Upgrading in Global Value Chains in Developing and Emerging Economies

Event Type
Conference

Location / Date
Bonn, 28.11.2016 until 29.11.2016

German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)

The workshop brought together researchers from both qualitative and quantitative research backgrounds who have shown their expertise in this field in order to promote an exchange about the state of the art and potential future research avenues in relation to upgrading in GVCs. Each participant had the opportunity to present their recent research in this area and there will be plenty of opportunities to interact and discuss approaches as well as future pathways within the subject.

The question of the conditions for firms to be able to upgrade in their production has been widely researched at the theoretical level and using case-study based qualitative research. This work has shed light on the determinants of upgrading but it did not allow for generalization across economic sectors or country settings. Availability of new data at the firm, sector and country level now allows us to address this research gap systematically, but this had hardly been intended so far, not least due to the challenges of recombining theories, methodologies and empirical evidence from various disciplines.

By bringing together qualitative and quantitative researchers to discuss the topic of how upgrading in GVCs can be successful, we hope that new perspectives and, eventually, new results can emerge. Quantitative research can learn from qualitative research which conditions should be important for upgrading that could potentially be elicited from the data. This is of special relevance in the context of recent trends towards big data methods. Qualitative research, in turn, can profit from quantitative analyses to establish more general relationships that hold across a large number of countries. Moreover, correlations found by quantitative researchers can give hints to qualitative researchers on which connections or cases could deserve a more thorough in-depth analysis. In this way, exchanging perspectives can potentially help to illuminate blind spots in each methodological approach.

Hinweis

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