Global Value Chains and Inequality 

While the economic resilience of Global Value Chains (GVCs) has received significant attention in the past years, there are long-standing, much broader concerns about the social dimensions of the growing fragmentation of firms’ activities across geographic boundaries. The pandemic seems to have exacerbated issues related to societal resilience (e.g., the supplier squeeze, resorts to cheaper intermediaries such as importers) that were already underway. A huge problem with which international organisations and scholars alike are struggling is to make a good assessment of the distribution of value added along the chain of activities undertaken by firms from origin to delivery of goods and services, and account for the heterogeneity of the different firms active in the various parts of the chain and across countries. This also complicates a proper inventory of actual and desired effects of GVCs, in particular regarding the degree to which they reduce or increase inequality beyond well-known macro-level assessments: within the workforce, within communities and countries, and between different types of employees, communities and countries. In a series of multidisciplinary sub-projects, this PhD project aims to better understand the link between GVCs and inequality.