EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Global Value Chains in Africa

Neil Foster-McGregor, Florian Kaulich and Robert Stehrer

No 2015-024, MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT)

Abstract: This paper provides evidence on the extent of Global Value Chain (GVC) participation by Africa as a region and for individual African countries. We find that Africa as a whole is heavily involved in GVCs, being more engaged in GVCs than many developing country regions as well as developed countries such as the USA. This overall finding hides the fact that much of Africa's participation in GVCs is in upstream production, with African firms providing primary inputs to firms in countries further down the value chain. The possibility of upgrading within GVCs in Africa is likely to be limited therefore, something which the current analysis suggests. Despite this, we observe a great deal of heterogeneity in terms of GVC participation and upgrading across African countries, with a number of African countries participating in GVCs to a relatively large extent.

Keywords: Africa; Global Value Chains; GVC; Upgrading (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D46 F15 F23 O14 O25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-int and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://unu-merit.nl/publications/wppdf/2015/wp2015-024.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:unm:unumer:2015024

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ad Notten (library@merit.unu.edu this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).

 
Page updated 2024-11-22
Handle: RePEc:unm:unumer:2015024