‘Grounding’ Global Value Chains? A Geographer’s Perspective on Outsourcing Economics
从地理学视角评述Milberg和Winkler的《外包经济学》，该书将全球价值链置于分析中心，挑战新古典贸易理论，强调领先企业决策和权力不对称对全球化收益分配的影响。
William Milberg has made important contributions to scholarship on the economics of globalisation, especially in relation to matters such as income distribution and economic growth. With Outsourcing Economics, he continues to advance work in this area, teaming up with fellow economist Deborah Winkler to produce an exceedingly dense yet fundamentally important book that tackles the role of offshoring in the internationalisation of production and its impact on labour and economic development. In the field of international economics that is largely dominated by neoclassical trade theories based on the specialisation and exchange of final goods, the book thus stands out as a novel and powerful take on globalisation by placing global value chains (GVCs)—sets of inter-firm networks involved in the production of commodities—at the centre of the analysis. Empirically, the core concern is the increasing proportion of world trade occurring within GVCs. Theoretically, the assertion is that the Ricardian logic of comparative advantage can no longer comprehend this ‘new wave’ of globalisation. Growing trade in intermediate goods and the vertical disintegration of production along GVCs have undermined the validity of such economic models. Rather than a set of natural ‘market forces’ determining the volume and direction of trade between national economies, the decisions by lead firms and the power asymmetries among GVC actors are now the major elements shaping the (uneven) distribution of the gains from globalisation.