Welcome to the launch of the new edition of the GVC Development Report, which comes out at a critical juncture for the future of value chains and the global economy. I also think it comes at a critical juncture as we try to reflect on the kind of WTO we want going forward and a valuable look at what is happening to value chains and how they are reconfiguring or not. It's very important.
The report reflects a collective effort starting in 2017 to understand the evolution of global value chains. And I want to start by thanking UIBE President Zhao and his team at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing for producing this report. Thank you, as well as to our partners at the Asian Development Bank, IDE-JETRO, and the World Economic Forum for bringing this collaborative report to life. Our former chief economist and now editor in chief of the report Bob Koopman has been a wonderful leader throughout the two year production cycle. I'm really grateful for the excellent speakers today for bringing government and private sector perspectives on where things stand with respect to value chains and where they might be headed. The World Trade Organization Secretariat has been a proud contributor to the GVC report since the first day. I want to thank Johanna and under her the team--Victor, Michael, Ankai, Marc and other members of ERSD team. They know how proud I am of their work. It goes without seeing this is the kind of evidence of the kind of thing we are contributing to at the WTO if we are to make a difference.
This new report has reaffirmed something we at the WTO have been saying: globalization is far from over, and global value chains remain indispensable. The share of GVC trade in the global total has declined only marginally from its 2022 peak of 48%, to 46.3% last year. Firms and governments are not retreating from global integration, but reconfiguring it to meet new economic, political, and social priorities. This goes in the same direction of what we have been pushing for under the banner of a word coined by Bob Koopman called 're-globalization' that I completely fell in love with when I joined because it just captured what I was thinking and thought we should be thinking about a re-imagined globalization that helps to diversify global value chains and uses it to bring more economies that were on the margins of the global economy into the mainstream.
A unique opportunity is being presented to us for it to happen in a way that will take us away from excessive concentration, which is one of the things we are seeing now and it's amazing to me that at a time when the system is seeing so much disruption whichever way we look at it, it seems to be so resilient. Businesses are getting on, manufacturers and investors as much as they can, with the uncertainty and just doing what they know how to do best. And that's why we see the resilience in global value chains.
In the face of the unprecedented shocks of the past decade, from the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerating climate pressures to rising geopolitical tensions and financial uncertainty global production networks have been resilient. Instead of unraveling, as some voices predicted, GVCs have been adapting, becoming more digital, and increasingly responding to security and sustainability concerns.
The data and evidence collected for the report mainly runs through 2024 and thus they predate the tariff increases and associated uncertainty seen in 2025. That said, the latest available data as of this month appeared to confirm the report's key finding of GVC resilience. Trade growth has remained robust. Supply chains have shown themselves to be adaptable thanks to firms' agility and creative policy approaches to managing disruptions. There are many who do not believe this evidence and find it counterintuitive. I think we have to be very ready to support and substantiate and defend the information we have.
As the Marrakech preamble reminds us, trade is a means to an end, and the report highlights how the ongoing shifts in value chains have profound implications for the way globalization affects people's lives and economic prospects. For instance, across Latin America and Africa new technologies and the green transition, together with the ongoing push for supply chain diversification, offer fresh possibilities to integrate into global value chains. Meanwhile, as the report describes, governments are using industrial policy and strategic partnerships to reposition economies within global value chains.
Consider the electric vehicle sector. China has emerged as a leader spanning inputs, assembly, and recycling. Meanwhile, African producers are seeking to retain greater value from mineral processing. Latin America is striking a growing number of sector-specific arrangements—often regulation-focused and non-binding—to position itself as another key supplier to the sector.
At the same time, we have seen policy-driven increases in trade costs and a sharp increase in policy uncertainty. These are particularly burdensome for marginalized regions that lack an established track record of hosting multinational production. As the report's GVC readiness diagnostics highlight, these regions already have existing structural impediments to overcome, such as digital infrastructure gaps, institutional bottlenecks, and logistics constraints. The report also emphasizes an additional problem, particularly for smaller exporting firms: persistent shortages of trade finance - estimated above one trillion US dollars annually. Such factors add up and are a major reason why the report finds that the ongoing rewiring of GVCs has mostly benefited countries that were already established as suppliers.
If GVCs are to become more deconcentrated, diversified, and resilient, we need to be more creative about overcoming such obstacles. And the report contains valuable lessons in this regard. It shows that governance cooperation has continued, though less in the form of traditional bilateral and regional agreements, than via more informal, often non-binding, issue-specific frameworks. For instance, the report identifies more than 180 targeted trade deals with a focus on digital trade and critical minerals signed as of 2024. These arrangements can help build trust and predictability in the new governance landscape. Delivering new WTO frameworks, like our plurilateral Agreement on Investment Facilitation for Development, would be of immense value here.
The report sheds light on issues at the heart of current trade tensions. There is new empirical work to illustrate how industrial policy impacts propagate through upstream and downstream linkages, creating both positive learning externalities and negative displacement or overcapacity risks when effects spill over across borders.
In conclusion, the report shows that the global trading system continues to connect people and businesses across the globe. The report itself is made in the world, it brings together contributions from more than 60 scholars—it really draws from a wide variety and it's very interesting how they bring the different perspectives into being.
Speech delivered by WTO Director General NGOZI OKONJO-IWELA during the launch of 2025 Global Value Chain Development Report
