Functional specialisation and income distribution along global value chains

Federico Riccio, Giovanni Dosi and Maria Enrica Virgillito

Economic Systems Research, 2025, vol. 37, issue 1, 116-147

Abstract: This paper addresses two questions: first, the extent to which the participation in Global Value Chains (GVCs) has penalised labour as a globally insourced production input, and second, what happened to between-occupation functional inequality. We combine input–output (I–O) tables and labour income along the production stages of global value chains. We focus on foreign labour requirements in manufacturing industries and distinguish across four production stages, namely fabrication, marketing, R&D, and managerial functions, to map the relative specialisation patterns of different production sub-systems. Our results show that GVCs are hierarchically structured, with advanced countries specialising in upstream functions along global production networks. Fabrication workers are the largest losers in this process, accounting for most of the drop in labour share in advanced and developing countries. Considering that production workers make up more than 50% of the workforce in both advanced and developing countries, the loss of the labour share of blue-collar workers has contributed to increasing wage inequality globally.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/09535314.2024.2406877

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