Global Value Chains and Uneven Development

An empirical examination of the development pitfalls involving global value chains.

Are global value chains (GVCs) opportunity structures for economic upgrading, job creation, and poverty reduction? At least, this is what institutions like the World Bank suggest. However, the present book shows that this is not a tenable position—either on empirical or theoretical grounds. The study is conceived as an empirical ideology critique of the mainstream GVC approach, especially of its focus on upgrading as a development strategy. It is based on in-depth empirical research into upgrading strategies in Argentinian grain and oilseed value chains and their ramifications. Here, corporate actors organized along agribusiness value chains have demonstrated fairly successful trajectories of firm-level upgrading and, at the same time, employed the chain metaphor from the standpoint of specific business interests rather than a general development interest. Christin Bernhold devised the concept of “upgrading in and through class differentiation” to show how firm-level upgrading is based on, and at the same time re-shapes, class and power relations—shaping the uneven geographies of capitalism rather than eliminating them.