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In this paper, I examine changes in international trade associated with the integration of low- and middle-income countries into the global economy. Led by China and India, the share of developing economies in global exports more than doubled between 1994 and 2008. One feature of new trade patterns is greater South-South trade. China and India have booming demand for imported raw materials, which they use to build cities and factories. Industrialization throughout the South has deepened global production networks, contributing to greater trade in intermediate inputs. A second feature of new trade patterns is the return of comparative advantage as a driver of global commerce. Growth in low- and middle-income nations makes specialization according to comparative advantage more important for the global composition of trade, as North-South and South-South commerce overtakes North-North flows. China's export specialization evolves rapidly over time, revealing a capacity to speed up product ladders. Most developing countries hyper-specialize in a handful of export products. The emergence of low- and middle-income countries in trade reveals significant gaps in knowledge about the deep empirical determinants of export specialization, the dynamics of specialization patterns, and why South-South and North-North trade differ.

Using firm- and industry-level panel data, this study investigates the impact of the Ghana–China trade on labour productivity of Ghanaian manufacturing firms and compares it to the impact induced by the trade of Ghana with the OECD. The main findings suggest that the productivity effect in Ghanaian manufacturing firms triggered by engaging in international trade activities is contingent upon the industrial competitive advantage and the trading partners. The empirical results show that trading with China creates greater potentials for Ghanaian manufacturing firms to raise productivity in comparison to trading with OECD countries. Higher intensities of imports from China stimulate productivity gains while more exports to China only enhance productivity in industries in which Ghana has a comparative advantage.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for evaluating the relationship between China and Peru, drawing on dependency theory, against the backdrop of China’s explicit policies towards foreign direct investment. It seeks to transcend traditional interpretations of this relationship in the literature that focuses on China as either hegemon or a South–South partner to Latin American countries to highlight a more nuanced relationship. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a case study approach, focusing on China in Peru. The authors examine three areas of traditional, strategic and emerging industries drawing from Chinese national policies, reviewing these against characteristics of dependency: control of production, heterogeneity of actors, transfer of knowledge and delinking. Findings The authors find that Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Peru demonstrates mixed motives and collectively operates as an ambiguous player. Chinese firms appear to be willing to work with various actors, but this engagement does not translate into a decolonial development alternative in the absence of a Peruvian political will to delink and Chinese willingness to actively transfer control of production and knowledge. Originality/value This paper contributes to existing literature on China in Latin America by evaluating Chinese outward FDI in Peru against China’s strategic aims in terms of a re-evaluation of dependency theory.

This article studies what I describe as “state-coordinated investment partnerships,” an investment modality central to the deployment of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). These partnerships bring together state and business actors to export overcapacity and address infrastructural demands in underdeveloped markets. To do so, they require accumulation and sovereignty regimes that mirror, in contingent ways, similar social arrangements within China. The superposition of such regimes and the interests and social imaginaries of local actors produces forms of uneven and combined development and shapes the contours of the BRI's emerging developmental and geoeconomic footprints. The BRI exports also an elite development paradigm which promotes urbanization, connectivity and economic growth over participatory approaches. This paradigm projects a depoliticized version of China's present into the BRI's future to justify social and environmental dislocations, and shields Chinese firms from civil society scrutiny. My analysis rejects this elite perspective and favors a labor-centric approach that unearths the social foundations of the BRI. From this perspective, despite relevant differences in format, the BRI's quintessential investment modality is closely aligned to a contemporary global current of public-private partnerships endeavored to mobilize public resources and state power for the expansion of capitalist social relations.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an early assessment of India’s South-South cooperation for trade and technology (SSTT) with East Africa, focusing on Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It aims to analyse the role of SSTT in providing support to targeted sectors. Design/methodology/approach The paper examines SSTT, focusing on India and East Africa over a specific period (2000–2016) of its emergence, and extends the public sponsorship literature in international business (IB) to better understand the relationship between SSTT and value addition – applying to a particular case study of SSTT interventions in spices. Findings The paper highlights SSTT as a pathway to support value addition in global value chains (GVCs). Trade between India and East African countries has grown, with three developments over the period of analysis in particular: shifting trade patterns, growing share of intermediate goods trade and differences in GVC insertion. However, East African exports are largely of lower value. Capacity building to support processing capability and thriving markets can encourage greater value addition. Preliminary findings suggest early gains at the margins, as SSTT interventions have been focusing on capacity boosting with buffering and bridging mechanisms for increased volume of trade. Moving up the value chain however requires that specific value-enhancing activities continue to be targeted, building on regional capacities. Our high-level case study for spices suggests that activities are starting to have a positive effect; however, more focus is needed to specifically target value creation before export and in particular higher levels of processing. Practical implications While findings are preliminary, policy implications emerge to guide SSTT interventions. There is capacity for building higher value-added supply chains as is evident among East African countries that trade with each other – future SSTT programmes could tap into this and help build capacity in these higher-value value chains. Future SSTT programmes can take a comprehensive approach by aiming at interventions at key points of the value chain, and especially at points that facilitate higher value addition than initial processing. An example is that Ethiopia and Rwanda are likely to benefit from an expanded spice industry, but the next phase should be towards building processing for value-addition components of the value chain, such as through trade policies, incentivising exporters to add value to items before export. From a development perspective, more analysis needs to be done on the value chain itself – for instance, trade facilitation measures to help processers engage in value chains and to access investments for increasing value add activities. (iv), Future research should examine more closely the development impacts of SSTT, namely, the connection between increased trade, local job creation and sustained innovation, as it is these tangible benefits that will help countries in the Global South realise the benefits of increased trade. Originality/value The paper underlines how the SSTT approach can contribute to the critical IB and GVCs literature using a theoretical grounded approach from public sponsorship theory, and with a unique lens of development cooperation between countries in the global south and its emerging impact on development outcomes in these countries.

\"Despite their shared history and the potential benefits of cooperation in the twenty-first century, a bilateral and multilateral relationship among Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean remains an overlooked possibility. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this book advocates for increased and renewed cooperation among the regions.\"

The development cooperation system is currently under pressure to change and demonstrate its usefulness for addressing more complex development challenges. Triangular Cooperation constitutes a modality of cooperation that can contribute to this change, opening space to more inclusive formulas of partnership. However, such results are neither guaranteed nor automatic, as TC can also contribute to reinforcing vertical relationships that characterize traditional aid. It is therefore important to identify the factors that contribute to tipping this balance in one direction or another. This article aims to investigate these aspects, offering an analytical framework by which to identify the main elements that contribute to giving TC its transformative role. The analysis suggests that this result depends on the relationships established among the actors involved, which are conditioned not only by structural factors associated with the countries’ diverse conditions (economic, technological, geostrategic position) but also by other ideational and strategic factors.

Optimistic commentators welcome 'the rise of the South' as a phenomenon that will transform geopolitical architectures and development thought. This essay situates this alleged rise and 'South-South relations' within world market capitalism and discusses their liberating potential with a case study of Chinese mining investment in Ecuador. Despite the ostensibly differing approaches to development embodied in the Chinese and Ecuadorian alternatives to neoliberalism, the Mirador project reveals eerily familiar outcomes, dominated by visions of national modernization and business-state alliances that reproduce market inequalities and postcolonial exclusions. While the Mirador project grants significant economic clout to pursue development through redistributive means, it also attests to the role of the state in opening new market frontiers and securing conditions for transnational capital accumulation. I argue that in this context and similar ones, it is problematic to project the attributes of the South as a symbol of struggle for emancipation on to the nation-state. Although the South remains a useful concept, it should be understood as a space made up by those who are subject to diverse forms of oppression in the name of globalization and national development - a space that is reshaped by the works of the state in multiple and often contradictory ways.

This paper applies insights from different streams of value chain research to undertake a systematic analysis of various contemporary questions related to global value chains and their development implications. We exploit a detailed firm-level dataset that records the activities of 515 East African processing firms in three different value chains at the task level. By following a value chain mapping methodology, we first calculate the percentage of a chain’s total value-added that firms capture. After that, we separate and compare firms engaged to South–South and South–North value chains. We find that firms engaged with South–South chains tend to capture higher value-added shares while facing less entry barriers than firms predominantly engaged with South–North chains. This suggests that South–South value chains can provide a stepping-stone for firms to successfully participate in international markets.

This paper analyses the capacity of the South–South cooperation model (SSC) to facilitate policy transfer between countries, as opposed to North–South cooperation modalities. To this end, the nature and evolution of SSC, and especially its horizontality, and the changes in the policy transfer (PT) actors, are analysed with reference to what is being transferred. It is assumed that the nature of developed SSC models, and the inequality of positioning policies in the global policy market, affect the content of what is transferred and limit the capacities of SSC to transfer policy models between countries in the South. The empirical contrast is made through the analysis of the Programme EUROsociAL II, which has transferred knowledge for social cohesion policies in Latin America through horizontal and vertical models.