GVCs, digitalisation and services in Africa: What we know and what we would like to know

Participation in global value chains (GVCs) has become a defining feature of contemporary trade, enabling countries to specialise in discrete tasks rather than entire industries. For developing economies, GVCs promise access to technology, managerial know-how, and export markets. Yet Africa’s integration remains limited and mainly upstream: many economies export primary commodities or resource-based goods with modest domestic value addition. Manufacturing-led development, which characterised several Asian success stories, has proven difficult to replicate in Africa due to premature deindustrialisation, labour-saving technical change, and increasingly uncertain geopolitics that complicate “made in the world” production (Rodrik, 2018; Cadot et al., 2016)