Global production networks and the evolution of industrial capabilities: Does production sharing warp the Product Space?

Russell Thomson and Prema-chandra Athukorala

Departmental Working Papers from The Australian National University, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics

Abstract: Do production capabilities of countries evolve from existing capabilities or emerge de novo? The Product Space approach developed by Hidalgo, Klinger, Barabási & Hausmann (2007) postulates that a country’s existing industrial structure largely determines its opportunities for industrial upgrading. However, this is difficult to reconcile with the export dynamism of many developing countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Costa Rica and Vietnam that transformed from primary commodity dependence to exporters of dynamic manufactured products. In each of these cases, global production sharing facilitated industrial transition. In this paper, we advance the Product Space approach to accommodate the role of global production sharing. Using a newly constructed multi-country dataset of manufacturing exports that distinguishes between trade within global production networks and traditional horizontal trade, we find that that existing industrial structure has smaller impact, but trade openness has greater impact, on industrial upgrading within vertically integrated global industries.

Keywords: industrialization; product space; global production sharing; fragmentation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 L60 O14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-sea and nep-tid
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Related works:
Journal Article: Global production networks and the evolution of industrial capabilities: does production sharing warp the product space? (2020)
Working Paper: Global production networks and the evolution of industrial capabilities: Does production sharing warp the Product Space? (2018)
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