The positioning of French agrifood firms in GVCs
Résumé
Retailer-driven value chains are characterised by an efficient organization of logistics and the use of private standards to ensure product quality. These features can enhance the competitiveness of firms along all segments of the chain. In this paper, we investigate the differences between domestic suppliers of retailers and other agrifood firms in terms of their positioning along value chains. In line with recent work, we identify the participation of firms in global value chains (GVCs) through their involvement in both imports and exports at once, and assess the position of firms along the chain through the level of transformation of traded products. We link the data on imports and exports of French firms with the US input-output table converted to the NACE Rev. 2 level, which identifies agrifood industries at a very detailed level, and compute upstreamness indicators for each industry and firm, following recent approaches in the literature. Our results indicate that the domestic suppliers of the retailers import and export products with a higher level of processing (more downstream) and span more production stages than other firms in the food industry.