Global value chains and national innovation systems: a strained integration

Abstract

This study explores the recent attempts to integrate global value chain (GVC) and national innovation system (NIS) frameworks and the extent to which it might be unachievable coherently. These recent integration attempts disregard the tension between the organizational boundaries of multinational corporations (MNC) and the national space – as a locus of learning and generation of technologies – in two ways. First, the GVC approach assimilates microeconomic upgrading to learning and innovation, which might fail to account for systemic learning processes and structural competitiveness. Second, the GVC approach likens production to capital circulation, which is consistent with the logic that dominates the expansion of MNCs during financialization, which is more oriented to appropriation than to the international deployment of technology. We resort to Marx’s decomposition of production and circulation processes to assess different internationalisation processes: trade internationalisation, productive internationalisation, and financial internationalisation. This analysis provides some insights to understand the limits of both approaches and the integration attempts to cope with the actual process of internationalization of production.