Landes, Drew (2024) Trade, global value chains and power the role of oligopsony, 1995-2020. PhD thesis, The New School, USA.
Abstract
This dissertation represents an effort to quantify as well as investigate the impact of oligopsony power in global value chains (GVCs). The GVC form of production that coincided with a revolution in information and communication technology in the early 1990s diminished the relevance of established trade theories like comparative advantage, which struggle to account for and explain modern trade flows (Milberg and Winkler, 2013: 100-101). This dissertation extends the analysis of Milberg and Winkler (2013), who documented the emergence of oligopolistic lead firms in GVCs that wield significant oligopsony power over supplier firms, driving down prices and compressing production timelines to preserve their market dominance (Milberg and Winkler, 2013; 25). Chapter 2 explores how power is conceptualized within influential trade theory paradigms and assesses their relevance to global trade, particularly in the context of fragmented production. Employing a criteria pairing the 'relational' power defined by sociologists Steven Lukes and Max Weber alongside the 'structural' power outlined by political economist Susan Strange, the chapter finds power is best accounted for by the GVC framework. Chapter 3 develops a novel measure of GVC oligopsony power by combining a trade-in-value-added methodology with a weighted in-degree centrality network analysis technique. Using the OECD TiVA 1995-2020 dataset, high oligopsony power is found to be the feature of a small group of country-sectors, is moderately correlated with economic size, rose sharply for those country-sectors until the early 2000s and declined thereafter for all but the US motor vehicles, trailers and semi-trailers and China construction sectors. These two rose dramatically in oligopsony power through the late 2010s. Chapter 4 provides a detailed case study of the Chinese construction sector, finding it to be pivotal for the country's growth and development strategy. The sector's import demand became massively resource intensive, accounting for 9% and 20% of total global energy producing and non-energy producing mining and quarrying, respectively, by 2020. The chapter uses the "smile curve" methodology from Meng and Ye (2022) to analyze the distributional patterns of China construction's GVC between 1995 and 2020, finding evidence of downward pressures on the sector's global suppliers.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor: | Milberg, William |
| Index terms: | methodology, evidence, accounting, China, dataset, construction sector, emergence, market dominance, information and communication technology, strategy, quarrying, paradigm, mining, dissertation, network analysis, value chain, case study, import |
| Subjects: | economic analysis, research dissemination and communication, evaluation and assessment methods, market analysis, research methods, Geography, data analysis and analytics, data collection methods, computing systems, data management, geotechnical engineering, industry analysis, systems engineering, education and knowledge transfer, management, value chain strategy |
| Topics: | Supply Chain Management, Engineering Principles, Geographical Context, Digital Applications, Business Strategy, Research Practice |
| Descriptive scope: | 5 PCTEA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here