Global value chains and national states: the sun rises over the east

PEREZ ALMANSI, BRUNO; PÉREZ IBÁÑEZ, JAVIER

Congreso; YSI-INET Plenary - Session: Conceptual issues regarding the role of the state in international perspective; 2020

INET

In the decades of 1970 and 1980 there have been several changes that modified the world economic order. This process has been driven by the innovations of the third industrial revolution, especially the ones from the information and communications technology (ICT), and has been known as globalization. It implies different aspects such as cultural, political, financial and productive. In this paper we will focus on the last one, explaining the formation of Global Value Chains (GVC). Based on this we will discuss how these changes affected the relationship between the multinational enterprises and their national states from origin and how some countries have benefited from this process. To that aim we will describe how this process broke the Fordist Keynesian way of production and what consequences it has to the state's capacities. Essentially, we want to demonstrate how these divergent national or regional performances and configurations had entered into tension with this global process, where different states, as the main intersection between the national and the international dimension, have had the capacity to capitalize this global context. From this point of view, we will analyse two main aspects of the international economy. On one side, we will examine the economic growth and the participation in GVC of all the countries. On the other side, we will explore the changes in the ranking of the first 500 multinational enterprises done by Fortune magazine, focusing on the nationality of these firms. The results of the empirical work will allow us to strengthen the theoretical interpretation developed in the first part of the paper.