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# **1 Introduction**

Securing market access and promoting exports are since long considered as primary drivers of economic growth and prosperity. The emergence of Global Value Chains (GVCs), which encompass production processes whose stages are spread across different countries, industries, and firms, complicate policy-making decisions. Global Value Chains introduce new opportunities and risks compared to traditional trade. On the one hand, GVC-led growth strategies feature additional gains from specializing in specific tasks or components and securing better access to inputs, technology, and skills through repeated firm-to-firm interactions (World Bank, 2019 and Antr`as, 2020). On the other hand, GVC participation presents countries with greater challenges, including more income inequality and heightened exposure to imported shocks and risks (due for example to dependencies on foreign partners, sourcing challenges, market concentration of critical inputs or stages of production, and new types of technology and intellectual property vulnerabilities).

Understanding how countries and sectors participate in global production networks is essential for analyzing the drivers of economic development, resilience to shocks, and the welfare implications of globalization. While trade in value-added and related GVC metrics have become mainstream in policy and academic circles, most rely on trade-based measures constructed from Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) tables, and bi-partite backward-forward classifications of linkages. These conventional measures, while insightful, fall short in some key respects: they often blur distinctions between participation modes, overlook indirect contributions of non-exporting sectors, and distort the true scale and nature of GVC integration.

This paper addresses these gaps by advancing both the methodology and interpretation of GVC participation metrics. It targets two fundamental questions: how much do countries and industries participate to traditional trade and to GVCs? And in what different ways? It argues that answering these questions requires a decomposition into three components: pure backward participation, pure forward participation, and a two-sided engagement strategically positioned between the extremes, involving elements of both backward and forward participation. Furthermore, the paper also advocates for extending the assessment of GVC participation to include both trade-based and output-based metrics. This approach deviates significantly from conventional metrics that decompose participation in backward and forward linkages and focus exclusively on trade measures. These two improvements allow to capture indirect and non-exporting contributions to global production and align measures more closely with real-world production structures.

Applying this methodology to major ICIO datasets (EORA, ADB MRIOT, OECD TiVA, and WIOD), we construct a comprehensive set of indicators covering nearly 190 countries and up to 56 industries starting in 1990, and updated to the most recent year of available data, which at the time of writing (March 2025) goes to 2023. The new metrics show that previous approaches systematically underestimate the extent and complexity of GVC participation, especially for services, upstream manufacturing, and countries with low exportto-output ratios. They also reveal distinct patterns of engagement that matter for resilience, risk exposure, and by extension for economic development.

By bridging conceptual gaps in existing GVC measures, this paper equips policymakers and researchers with more accurate and actionable tools for understanding globalization’s evolving landscape and their implications for economic growth, exposure to shocks, and development. For example, the paper shows that the risks associated with a country’s involvement in GVCs