Research on Participation and Position Evaluation of Korean Manufacturing Global Value Chain: Based on the Comparative Analysis with China and the United States

Purpose – This article will take the Korean manufacturing industry as an example to estimate Korea’s global value chain status from the perspective of overall and sub-industry, hoping to provide a theoretical reference for Korean manufacturing to climb the global value chain. Design/methodology – Based on the WIOD data. The data is calculated by using MATLAB (2014a) coding. The data for 6 sectors are classified according to the International Standard Industrial Classification revision 3 (ISIC Rev. 3), the WIOD data are used to calculate and compare the position, participation and dynamics of the Korea, China and USA` manufacturing industry in the 1995-2016. Findings – The empirical results supported conclusions of the theoretical model. In the Korean GVC of electrical and optical sector, while stronger forward linkages than backward linkages to GVC are advantageous for an average advanced country, the benefits of downstream tasks are pronounced for non-advanced countries. And proved the correlation for an index to capture a country’s upstream position or downstream position, it makes sense to compare that Korea’s exports of intermediates in the same sector that are used by China and USA. Originality/value – The first is to re-examine the characteristics of South Korea’s participation in global value chains under a more systematic and accurate theoretical framework, which provides a new empirical reference for related research; the second is to content covers of the manufacturing 6 sectors, so as to more completely describe the characteristics of Korean manufacturing’s participation in global value chains; The value of this paper is providing empirical evidence of the effect of Korea’s the GVC of manufacturing sectors. In the GVC of 6 sectors, first three have a higher position in the value chain and are in the upper middle and upper reaches of the GVC. The latter two have a low GVC position index, which has become the main sector that pulls down the overall position of Korea’s manufacturing industry.