High Tech Versus Low Tech During the COVID-19 Era TiVA Based Evidence on Manufacturing Global Value Chain Participation

Abstract

This thesis examines how COVID-era adjustment in global value chains can be interpreted within the debate on fragility and resilience. Rather than treating global value chain participation as a single aggregate measure, the analysis distinguishes between backward participation, defined as foreign value added embodied in domestic exports, and forward participation, defined as domestic value added embodied in foreign exports. This margin-specific perspective is used to assess whether high technology manufacturing industries adjusted differently from a lower-technology comparison group over the 2020–2022 period. The empirical analysis relies on OECD TiVA 2025 data and constructs a balanced panel of manufacturing industries observed across 80 reporting economies from 2017 to 2022. Technology intensity is operationalised through the OECD R&D-intensity taxonomy. The empirical strategy estimates year-specific high-technology differentials separately for backward and forward participation, using country–industry fixed effects and year fixed effects. The estimates are interpreted as descriptive evidence of differential adjustment patterns, not as causal effects of the pandemic. The results indicate that post-2019 adjustment was selective, margin-specific, and temporally uneven. Backward participation does not display a robust or persistent differential reconfiguration between high-technology industries and the lower-technology comparison group. Forward participation, by contrast, shows a clearer pattern: high-technology industries experienced a temporary relative strengthening in 2020 and 2021, followed by normalisation in 2022. These findings do not support a simple narrative of generalized global value chain fragility, nor do they imply unchanged resilience. They suggest instead that post-shock adjustment is better understood by identifying where, across distinct value-added margins, change becomes visible. The thesis contributes to the fragility– resilience debate by showing that COVID-era adjustment in manufacturing was technology structured, margin-specific, and more clearly observable on the forward side of value-added participation than on the backward side.