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This paper aims at revisiting the empirical evidence on the recent trends of countries' integration in global value chains (GVCs) in Europe. It investigates two potential sources of unbalances that these processes might relate to (i) the sectoral specialization of the patterns of international fragmentation, whether high-technology manufacturing or knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), and (ii) the occupational categories that have benefited or been penalized by these trends. A rich empirical mapping of these trends in the European countries is provided, based on World Input–Output Database and European Union Labour Force Survey (EU LFS) data. The results on the overall and sectoral-specific trends of integration in GVCs and the associated changes in the shares of managers and manual workers show dual-speed and qualitatively different integration patterns in Europe, with Eastern European (EE) countries rapidly integrating in high-tech manufacturing and the core of Western countries strengthening their mutual integration in the KIBS area. Despite the relatively "good quality" integration of EE countries, the evidence does not seem to reveal a mirroring upgrading of employment structures. While this empirical contribution does not attempt to identify causal relationships, the picture provided in the paper shows that, overall, integration in GVCs seems to reproduce and perhaps exacerbate the initial asymmetries in the sectoral and employment structure, with employment shares of manual workers reducing on the whole and knowledge-intensive occupations concentrating in Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the determinants of a country's participation in business services (BS) global value chains (GVCs). BS GVCs are comparatively less explored than traditional manufacturing ones, and there is a gap in the literature on the relative positions of countries in BS GVCs and the opportunities they might open for development. This article puts forward and finds empirical support to the conjecture that the domestic structure of backward and forward linkages à la Hirschman , alongside the domestic representative demand for BS à la Linder , are of high importance. The results, based on the World Input-Output Database, suggest that the presence of strong domestic backward-linked industries to BS makes an emerging country more likely to create domestic value within BS GVC. Our findings contribute to the debate on a "premature de-industrialization" in emerging countries and on the relationship between levels of development and engagement in BS GVCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article revisits two classical approaches to development and trade, and offers an alternative account of the emergence of global value chains (GVCs) involving business services (BS), to trade-in-tasks theory. Based on this account, we propose what we call the Hirschman–Linder hypothesis (HLH), which predicts the need for an adequate 'representative domestic' (intermediate) demand for BS for countries to enter and upgrade in BS GVCs. We review the quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence supporting the HLH and find two main results: (i) countries with a substantial manufacturing core are more likely to participate (and eventually to upgrade) in BS GVCs, and (ii) countries endowed or specialized in natural resource industry (NRI), either the primary or extractive sectors are also likely to be part of BS GVCs. If BS GVCs represent globalization's third unbundling for developing countries, the HLH suggests that on the one hand a core manufacturing sector is essential for entering and upgrading in BS GVCs, and on the other hand that if countries can diversify into BS and upgrade in BS GVCs specialization in natural resources might not necessarily be a curse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]