The Global Value Chains (GVC) Initiative seeks to consolidate and foster the GVC perspective, an industry-centric view of economic globalization that highlights the linkages between economic actors and across geographic space. It is an ongoing effort to test and develop the GVC perspective with the aims of creating greater analytical precision, intellectual impact and policy relevance. Our efforts include a research agenda, a publishing thrust, the development and dissemination of industrial upgrading handbooks for practitioners, and an ongoing series of intensive workshops convened to test and broaden the framework through interactions with our network partners and with the broader academic, policy-making and activist communities.

The Global Value Chains Initiative has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Initiative consists of a dynamic network of researchers, activists, and policymakers that began working together in 2000. The co-organizers of the Initiative are Gary Gereffi of the Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness (CGGC) at Duke University; John Humphrey of the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex; and Timothy Sturgeon of the Industrial Performance Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.