When Linder Meets Hirschman: Inter-Industry Linkages and Global Value Chains in Business Services

The scholarship on Global Value Chains (GVCs) is recently focusing on the international fragmentation of production that involves services and in particular business services. It has been argued that participation in business services GVCs might open up new opportunities for structural change and catching up in developing countries. What are the theoretical and empirical bases for such a claim? This paper puts forward the conjecture that factor endowments and costs are not the only driver for the emergence of service GVCs and that the specific domestic structure of backward linkages à la Hirschman is of great importance. We empirically test this conjecture on the basis of the World Input Output Data in a GMM framework. We then attempt brief implications in terms of industrial policy for developing countries, particularly on the importance of developing domestic specialisation in business services before joining GVCs as a catching-up strategy.