Inequality and Income Distribution in Global Value Chains

Medeiros, Carlos Aguiar de; Trebat, Nicholas

doi:10.1080/00213624.2017.1320916

Cited by 55 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…This monopolization has dramatic consequences, since "knowledge is not an object defined in a limited physical space (…) the full-blown private ownership of knowledge means a global monopoly that limits the liberty of many individuals in multiple locations" (Pagano, 2014(Pagano, , p. 1413. IPR rents have been found to be highly unequally distributed (Foley, 2013, Aguiar de Medeiros & Trebat, 2017, and even to be associated with a slowdown in firm investment as would be predicted by standard monopoly analysis but which also follows Steindl's (1952) notion of maturity and stagnation (Pagano and Rossi, 2009).…”

Section: Intangibles and Monopolization In The Digital Agementioning

confidence: 82%

Intellectual monopoly in global value chains

Durand

Milberg

2019

Review of International Political Economy

215

139

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More than two decades of scholarship on global value chains (GVCs) has reshaped our understanding of the global economy while tracking the international fragmentation of productive process and its socioeconomic consequences. In this paper we focus on the effort by lead firms to capture market power in the provision of and production of intangible assets. The analysis builds on Pagano's (2014) notion of "intellectual monopoly", where government protections of intellectual property have the effect of locking in the monopoly power from intangible asset creation. We extend it to the presence of scale economies and network externalities associated with the production of intangible assets.

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Section: Intangibles and Monopolization In The Digital Agementioning

confidence: 82%

Intellectual monopoly in global value chains

Durand

Milberg

2019

Review of International Political Economy

215

139

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“…To what extent changes in the international division of labor have actually led to upward (or downward) mobility of countries in the core-periphery structure? Is there a real benefit of GVCs participation for developing countries in terms of long-term impact on capacity building and sustainability of the local industrial base or it simply results in different forms of dependence and reproduction of global inequality [10]?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Core-periphery structure in sectoral international trade networks: A new approach to an old theory

et al. 2020

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The research on core-periphery structure of global trade from a complex-network perspective has shown that the world system is hierarchically organized into blocks and that countries play different roles in the world economy. Yet, little attention has been paid to investigating whether the sectoral international trade networks conform to a core-periphery structure, hence what is the role of different levels of processing in creating and maintaining structural inequality. This issue is of particular importance given the contemporary focus upon global production networks and reshaping of the international division of labor. With this in mind, we propose a model (LARDEG) from network science to reexamine old theories in economics, such as core-periphery structures in sectoral international trade networks and test whether the global value chains have changed structural positions in terms of the level of processing. The economic background of our model permitting a more accurate sorting of countries into structural positions and the general stability of results have provided for a more solid measurements than has hereto been possible. Our algorithm naturally produces networks with hierarchically nested block structure obtained from an iterative decomposition of the network periphery such that each block represents a vertex set of a maximal size subgraph existing at different levels. The results not only lend support to the previous hierarchical model of the world-system (core, semi-periphery, and periphery) but also find that, depending on particular industry, the number of analytically identifiable blocks could be more than three. We show that 'size effect' is the one that prevails for core block membership at the first hierarchical level, while the GNI per capita is a much poorer proxy for the world-system status. Moreover, the patterns of blocks we label as the second-or third-level 'core' are strongly dependent on distance and geographical proximity. Overall, the various configurations of asymmetrical trade patterns between our blocks and the remarkably stable position of core countries at the top of structure clearly indicate that the rise of global production networks has actually restored a huge and unequal international division of labor splitting the world into 'headquarter' and 'factory' economies.

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“…Second, while international inequality in incomes has declined, inequality within countries has increased, certainly in richer countries (Alvaredo et al, 2018). This is often explained by regressive domestic economic policies and weakening of social safety nets combined with globalization, whereby global value chains put downward pressure on less-skilled workers' 20/26 wages (or increase unemployment outright) in rich countries through competition with developing countries, while the incomes of managers at company headquarters grow faster (Aguiar de Medeiros and Trebat, 2017;Milberg and Winkler, 2013;Wood, 1995). And despite rhetoric to the contrary, the current US administration's policies have supported an entrenchment of these trends (Mayer and Phillips, 2019).…”

Section: /26mentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical evolution of global inequality in carbon emissions and footprints versus redistributive scenarios

Semieniuk

Yakovenko

2020

Journal of Cleaner Production

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Ambitious scenarios of carbon emission redistribution for mitigating climate change in line with the Paris Agreement and reaching the sustainable development goal of eradicating poverty have been proposed recently. They imply a strong reduction in carbon footprint inequality by 2030 that effectively halves the Gini coefficient to about 0.25. This paper examines feasibility of these scenarios by analyzing the historical evolution of both weighted international inequality in CO2 emissions attributed territorially and global inequality in carbon footprints attributed to end consumers. For the latter, a new dataset is constructed that is more comprehensive than existing ones. In both cases, we find a decreasing trend in global inequality, partially attributed to the move of China from the lower to the middle part of the distribution, with footprints more unequal than territorial emissions. These results show that realization of the redistributive scenarios would require an unprecedented reduction in global inequality far below historical levels. Moreover, the territorial emissions data, available for more recent years up to 2017, show a saturation of the decreasing Gini coefficient at a level of 0.5. This observation confirms an earlier prediction based on maximal entropy reasoning that the Lorenz curve converges to the exponential distribution. This saturation further undermines feasibility of the redistributive scenarios, which are also hindered by structural tendencies that reinforce carbon footprint inequality under global capitalism. One way out of this conundrum is a fast decarbonization of the global energy supply in order to decrease global carbon emissions without relying crucially on carbon inequality reduction.

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Inequality and Income Distribution in Global Value Chains

Cited by 55 publications

References 8 publications

Intellectual monopoly in global value chains

Intellectual monopoly in global value chains

Core-periphery structure in sectoral international trade networks: A new approach to an old theory

Historical evolution of global inequality in carbon emissions and footprints versus redistributive scenarios

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