Industry globalization: construct, measurement and variation across industries

What is it about?

Research on globalization has been hindered by lack of conceptual clarity and inconsistent operationalizations. Our focus in this paper is industry-level globalization. We argue that globalized industries have four important characteristics: cross-border product flows, cross-border capital flows, dispersal of global value chains, and global competition. We then point out how lack of availability of data limits our ability to develop an operationalization that encompasses all these four aspects of globalization. We draw particular attention to the fact that revenues arising from licensing arrangements are missing from extant operationalizations of industry globalization. We also identify some of the most important factors driving industry globalization as well as the major impediments to globalization.

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