This report analyzes the specific factors that affect the competitiveness of developing countries in global value chains (GVCs), and how these factors differ across four major economic sectors: agriculture, extractive industries, manufacturing and offshore services. Although integration into...

This paper provides a review of the available literature on global value chains (GVCs) and employment markets in developing countries. Due to the difficulty of observing intra-GVC transactions, there is very little direct empirical work on GVCs and labour markets. However, it is possible to...

Concerns are growing about policies and measures that restrict market access with the effect of “forcing” technology transfer. Efforts to target forced technology transfer are complicated by the sometimes blurred line between voluntary and mutually agreed upon technology transfers and that...

The aim of this paper is to inform the ongoing debate on the policies being used to encourage international technology transfer (ITT) and, of these, which have the potential to distort trade or investment and which may effectively promote ITT. The paper develops a first-cut approach to...

This paper provides a broad overview of some of the issues that digital trade raises for ASEAN countries and its MSMEs, including new opportunities that digitalisation presents for ASEAN firms to increase trade. However, it shows that adoption of relatively simple digital tools, such as...

Although global value chain (GVCs) participation in Southeast Asia has been growing, little is known about whether the benefits from participation are accruing to larger firms or if small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), which make up the majority of companies and employ the bulk of the...

Participation in global value chains (GVCs) can be a pathway for economic development. It is associated with growing productivity, exporting more sophisticated products and a less concentrated export basket (Kowalski et al., 2015). However, it is often argued that these benefits accrue mainly to...

This study empirically investigates key restrictions to the internationalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing and across different types of services. The study explores the extent to which binding constraints faced by SMEs producing goods may differ from small...