GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS AND NATIONAL INNOVATION SYSTEMS: A STRAINED INTEGRATION

ROBERT, VERÓNICA; LAVARELLO, PABLO JOSÉ; VÁZQUEZ, DARÍO

Revista de Economia Contemporânea

UFRJ

Año: 2023 vol. 27

ABSTRACT: This study explores the recent attempts to integrate global value chain (GVC)and national innovation system (NIS) frameworks and the extent to which it might beunachievable coherently. These recent integration attempts disregard the tension betweenthe organizational boundaries of multinational corporations (MNC) and the nationalspace – as a locus of learning and generation of technologies – in two ways. First, the GVCapproach assimilates microeconomic upgrading to learning and innovation, which mightfail to account for systemic learning processes and structural competitiveness. Second,the GVC approach assimilates production to capital circulation, which is consistentwith the logic that dominates the expansion of MNCs during financialization, whichis more oriented to appropriation than to the international deployment of technology.We resort to Marx’s decomposition of production and circulation processes to assess different internationalisation processes: trade internationalisation, productiveinternationalisation, and financial internationalisation. This analysis provides someinsights to understand the limits of both approaches and the integration attempts tocope with the actual process of internationalization of production.