The Impact Of Information And Communication Services On Global Value Chains

The revolution of Information and Communication Technology has always been the driver of social development and progress. And along with the rapid growth of intermediate products trade, its role in the formation and development of the Global Value Chains has become more and more significant.In order to explore the relationship between information and communication services and the participation of global value chains at national level, the paper first analyzes the mechanism of information and communication services acting on the participation of global value chains respectively from the perspectives of labor division, services embedding as well as the competitive advantages of value chains. Then this paper establishes a mathematical model to prove the rationality of the above mechanism, using the data of GVCs indicators based on the value-added trade database.In the empirical part, our data covers 56 economies and 5 years (1995,2000, 2005,2008 and 2009), and uses the GVC participation index, the length of GVCs and distance to final demand as three explained variables to investigate the information and communication services’effect on the global value chains. And the main results are as following:(1) Information and communication services can effectively enhance the GVCs participation index of all the economies, and the effect on the non-OECD economies is stronger than that on the OECD economies; (2) Information and communication services can broaden the length of GVCs of non-OECD economies, however, shorten the length of GVCs of OCED economies, but the latter effect is not significant; (3) The more developed information and communication services are, the longer the distance to final demand of non-OECD economies are, this shows that non-OECD economies have become more specialized in the production of intermediate products. However, information and communication services’effect on the distance to final demand of OECD economies is not significant.Finally, in order to promote all the countries to better use the information and communication services when they participate in the global value chains, combined with the research results and the existing problems, this paper puts forward some relevant policy recommendations to promote the development of information and communication services from the perspective of improving the information and communication technology infrastructure, etc.