A review of research on global value chain upgrading of manufacturing enabled by digital economy

Abstract

The digital economy based on a new generation of digital technology has become a new driving force for the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry, but the existing research is relatively lagging behind and difficult to effectively guide China to get rid of the low-end lock in the manufacturing industry. This paper focuses on how the digital economy upgrades the global value chains of manufacturing industry at the enterprise and industrial levels, and reviews the upgrading of the value chain of manufacturing industry enabled by the digital economy from four aspects: digital infrastructure, digital technology, manufacturing digitization and digital service industry. It is found that there are many research perspectives, methods and fruitful results on this topic. However, it has not formed a systematic theoretical system. It is hoped that more studies in the future can focus on the measurement of digital economy and value chain upgrading, so as to have more accurate and unified indicators to measure the empowerment of digital economy to manufacturing value chains, and include more new categories in digital economy into the analytical framework.