GVC Governance

gvc-governance measures structural power over global value chains — the dictation lead firms exert over dispersed suppliers, control of critical chain nodes, authorship of the rules the chain runs on, and the power to push the adjustment burden onto others. The structural question is: who governs how and where others produce within the chain, and on whose terms? — not how many large firms a country is home to. This metric serves Strange's "what is produced / on what terms" clauses.

GVC governance is almost the literal text of the production structure — "arrangements determining what is produced, by whom… by what method and on what terms" (Strange 1994, p.64) — and Strange describes the lead firm's dictating power directly:

• "power of business to move and protect markets, to generate and choose new technology, to pick the location for new plant and employment, to bargain with governments and with banks to get access to credit" (Strange 1994, p.83)
• "The class in a position to decide or to change the mode of production… [lays] down legal and administrative processes and precedents that make it hard for others to challenge" (Strange 1994, p.29)
• The adjustment burden: "the burden of what is euphemistically called 'adjustment' falling much more heavily on the developing than the industrialized countries" (Strange 1994, p.81)
• Denial-of-access over chain nodes: "whoever is able to develop or acquire and to deny the access of others to a kind of knowledge respected and sought by others… will exercise a very special kind of structural power" (Strange 1994, p.30).

Firm count or HQ domicile is possession; the governance lead firms exercise is the structural lever.