Transformations, trajectories, and similarities of national production structures: A comparative fingerprinting approach

by Carl Nordlund

This article proposes a network-analytical framework for the comparative study of national production structures in global production networks. Conceptualizing such structures as the linked networks of both domestic and foreign intermediate inputs, the latter constituting the characteristic feature of contemporary economic globalization, the proposed approach extracts a structural profile that captures the up- and downstream prominence of economic sectors for a particular country and year. These ‘fingerprints’ of national production structures can subsequently be compared on a pairwise basis, providing novel ways to determine and compare the structural similarities, transformations, and trajectories of national economies in the transnational production regime. Two shorter case studies exemplify the approach. The first applies clustering methods to explore spatiotemporal similarities of the production structures for 40 countries over the 1995–2011 period. Based on such similarities, an analytically useful classification into 11 structural types is proposed. The second study addresses structural transformations and trajectories during EU’s eastern enlargement, finding significant structural change, yet minuscule East-West convergence.