title: Global value trees.
abstract: The fragmentation of production across countries has become an important feature of the globalization in recent decades and is often conceptualized by the term "global value chains" (GVCs). When empirically investigating the GVCs, previous studies are mainly interested in knowing how global the GVCs are rather than how the GVCs look like. From a complex networks perspective, we use the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) to study the evolution of the global production system. We find that the industry-level GVCs are indeed not chain-like but are better characterized by the tree topology. Hence, we compute the global value trees (GVTs) for all the industries available in the WIOD. Moreover, we compute an industry importance measure based on the GVTs and compare it with other network centrality measures. Finally, we discuss some future applications of the GVTs.
authors.affiliation: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Lucca, Italy.
authors.forename: Zhen
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Lucca, Italy; Linkalab, Complex Systems Computational Laboratory, Cagliari, Italy.
authors.forename: Michelangelo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Puliga
authors.affiliation: Linkalab, Complex Systems Computational Laboratory, Cagliari, Italy; Department of Physics, Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy.
authors.forename: Federica
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Cerina
authors.affiliation: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Lucca, Italy; Linkalab, Complex Systems Computational Laboratory, Cagliari, Italy.
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chessa
authors.affiliation: IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Lucca, Italy; Department of Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Riccaboni
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D016208:Databases, Factual; D004467:Economics; D007221:Industry