Ricerc@Sapienza

Despite being symmetric in its very nature, the Covid-19 shock is affecting European economies in a very asymmetric way, threatening to deepen the divide between core and peripheral countries even more. It is not Covid-19 itself, however, but the contradictions within the EU’s growth model and institutional architecture that would be to blame for such an outcome. The dramatic impact of the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic and the threat that it poses to Eurozone survival seem to have forced a reluctant Germany into action: a minor step, but an important signal.

This paper investigates the effect of participation in global value chains (GVCs) on firms' efficiency and explores heterogeneity in this impact across different firms, according to GVC governance, positioning in the chain and time length of participation. Our analysis takes advantage of survey data providing information on involvement in GVCs for a large set of Italian industrial SMEs between 2008 and 2012.

This article takes advantage of a newly available survey on the Italian industry to analyze the behavior of global value chains (GVCs) in the aftermath of the Great Recession. We design a comprehensive taxonomy of GVC participation modes and explore their impact on firms' innovativeness and performance. Our findings highlight relevant heterogeneities in how GVC participants fared the crisis.