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• Publish Date：2026/04/30
  Modify Date：2026/04/30

To Diversify or Not to Diversify? That is the Question－A Study on GVC (Global Value Chains) Linkage Portfolios and Innovation

Speaker: Hong-Ji Huang (Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica)

Moderator: Chih-hsing Ho (Associate Research Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica)

Time: 11-5-2026 (Mon) 11:30

Venue: 1F, Conference Room, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica

Abstract: As geopolitics and global economy are undergoing systemic change, global value chains (GVC) have attracted close attention from scholars, policymakers, and corporate executives. In 2025, the World Trade Organization (WTO), along with several partners, published “The Global Value Chain Development Report 2025: The Re-wiring of GVCs in a Changing Global Economy”. The report highlights the prevailing trend of “resilience and re-globalization”, while echoes the World Bank’s call for broader GVC participation in “World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains”.

           Scholars have sought to explore GVC's connection with a broad range of development issues, such as industrial upgrading, trade negotiations, employment structure, and ecological degradation. However, GVC's impact on innovation is still a less-studied area that requires cross-disciplinary efforts. At the same, the mainstream NIS (national innovation systems) theory is basically inward-looking, paying insufficient attention to a nation's external linkage in the global sphere. To deal with this theoretical insufficiency, this research proposes an integrative approach that ushers in the micro-perspective of firms' knowledge search, takes on the role of global knowledge flows, and links up the NIS theory with GVC.

           Accordingly, this research establishes a theoretical model on how a country’s GVC forward and backward linkage portfolios affect its innovation performance. The empirical study on OECD countries confirms the hypotheses that a country’s forward-linking market concentration has a negative linear effect, while its backward-linking market concentration has a positive linear effect on innovation performance. However, contrary to what theoretical hypotheses predict, a country’s forward-linking product concentration has a positive linear effect on innovation performance, while its backward-linking product concentration has a U-shaped curvilinear effect on innovation performance. The major contribution of this research is to illustrate the importance of a country’s external GVC linkage as a lever to trigger more global knowledge transfer, and ultimately to produce more homegrown innovation.