Global Value Chain Restructuring: Resilience, Digitalization, and Re-globalization

Over the past two decades, global value chains have never been subjected to such intense tests as they are today. From the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to the escalation of geopolitical frictions, from financial market turbulence to the acceleration of climate change, each crisis has made "deglobalization" and "reshoring" hot topics of discussion. However, according to the latest "Global Value Chain Development Report 2025," global value chains have not collapsed; instead, they have shown remarkable resilience: they still account for 46.3% of global trade, only slightly below the peak of 48% in 2022. The signal conveyed by this data is that global production networks are not receding, but are quietly reshaping themselves amid the storm.

Digitalization and Servitization: New Growth Dimensions of Value Chains

A widely overlooked shift is that the industry composition of global value chains is moving from goods to services. Traditionally, because physical production is easier to segment, value chains were mainly built on goods trade; but with the deepening of digitalization, pure service value chains have been able to form and expand. Since 2019, the share of services trade in cross-border production networks has risen significantly, and digital service value chains were far less affected by the pandemic than goods value chains. This structural change has become an important factor in explaining the resilience of global value chains.

Geographical Restructuring: Emerging Economies Take the Stage

Another dimension of reglobalization is the diffusion of participants. Data show that the combined share of the ten economies with the highest participation in global value chains has fallen from 76% in 2010 to 64% in 2024. In Asia, economies such as Vietnam, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, India, and Thailand have all benefited from the restructuring of supply chains led by China. At the same time, the trade shares of Africa and Latin America have also shown signs of rising, although the digital divide and capital constraints still limit deep participation by these regions.

Take electric vehicles as an example: the geographical distribution of their value chains is rewriting the global automotive trade landscape. With the growth of EV sales, the relative positions of traditional automobile production centers and emerging manufacturing forces have shifted significantly. This not only reflects industrial transformation, but also shows how reglobalization reshapes trade flows through specific industries.

New Policy Tools: Industrial Subsidies and Targeted Trade Agreements

In the face of crises, agile government responses are reshaping value chains at multiple levels. In recent years, industrial and environmental policies have reached an unprecedented scale, with more than 70 economies introducing subsidies and interventions targeting "value-chain-intensive" areas such as semiconductors, clean energy, digital infrastructure, and critical minerals. While supporting their own national objectives, these policies also generate spillover effects through suppliers, customers, and third-party competitors. The report points out that indirect spillover effects sometimes even exceed direct domestic effects, bringing both positive learning effects and potential negative substitution risks for trading partners.Meanwhile, a flexible governance tool—targeted trade deals (TTDs)—is rapidly emerging. By the end of 2024, more than 185 such agreements had been signed in the digital trade and critical minerals sectors alone, with the majority concluded between 2019 and 2024. Preliminary evidence suggests that targeted trade deals in critical minerals increase trade between partners by about 12% on average, approaching the effect of shallow regional trade agreements. However, these agreements also raise concerns about insufficient transparency and fragmentation of rules. Of the 185 agreements, only 55 official texts are publicly visible; if coordination is lacking, overlapping rules could fragment the global trading system, but if embedded with transparent reporting and dialogue mechanisms, they could complement the multilateral framework.

Future Uncertainty

The Global Value Chain Development Report 2025 provides positive information about global value chains and global trade, but also points to new tensions that could trigger future volatility. Most of the data cited in the report predate the 2025 tariff increases and the uncertainty they brought, but the latest data as of February 2026 seem to confirm the report's core findings: global value chains remain resilient, trade growth remains solid, and although tensions and uncertainties are rising, the outlook remains unclear.

Supply chains have shown adaptability time and again, thanks to policymakers' flexible and creative management of trade disruptions. The world may be entering an era of value chains characterized by greater regionalization, digitalization, and securitization—an era where old maps have not yet become obsolete, but new boundaries are constantly emerging. In this era, understanding how value chains are being "rewired" will be key to grasping the direction of the global economy.