The use of different suppliers in the production of a good or a service, which can be located in different geographical areas. The academic literature has shown evidence of an internationalization and dispersion of production and assembly across borders and plants over the past two decades, and a rise of the trade in intermediate goods.
See also: Offshoring.
• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2012. "Mapping Global Value Chains". The OECD Conference Centre, Paris. 4-5 December 2012. http://www.oecd.org/dac/aft/MappingGlobalValueChains_web_usb.pdf
• G. Grossman and E. Rossi-Hansberg. "The Rise of Offshoring: It's not wine for cloth anymore" Paper presented at Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City symposium, "The New Economic Geography: Effects and Policy Implications," Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 24 -26. Available at: http://works.bepress.com/esteban_rossi_hansberg/16/ and https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/RO.pdf
• Foster, N., Stehrer, R., Timmer, M. 2013. "International fragmentation of production, trade and growth: Impacts and propects for EU member states" Economic Paper 484. European Commission.
http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/publications/economic_paper/2013/pd…
• G. Gereffi and M. Korzeniewicz (eds): Commodity chains and global capitalism (Westport, CT, Praeger, 1994); and G. Gereffi: “Commodity chains and regional divisions of labor in East
Asia”, in Journal of Asian Business, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2013), pp. 75–112.