A new OECD policy brief published on 8 April suggests that global value chains changed only modestly in 2023-24, indicating a slower pace of deglobalisation and a more uneven pattern of adjustment across economies.
The OECD said on 8 April that recent evidence from its new policy brief on global value chain repositioning points to only limited aggregate changes in global value chain participation in 2023 and 2024, suggesting that the pace of deglobalisation has slowed compared with the period from 2020 to 2022. The publication, Global value chain repositioning: Insights from the 2023-24 TiVA nowcasting exercise, was released as part of the OECD Statistics Briefs series.
That matters because supply-chain resilience, reshoring and economic security have moved to the centre of policy debate in Europe and beyond. In the abstract accompanying the brief, the OECD says its experimental estimates cover 41 economies and 24 sectors, and are intended to provide early evidence on how global value chain integration is evolving while governments reassess industrial structure, trade exposure and strategic vulnerability.
The main message is more restrained than much of the political language around supply chains in recent years. The OECD says the results do not point to a dramatic aggregate unwinding of global production networks in 2023-24. Instead, the organisation says the picture is one of limited overall change combined with marked differences between countries, with adjustment paths shaped by industrial structure, trade composition and policy settings.
That conclusion is important for European policymakers because it suggests that the global trading system is not fragmenting in a uniform way. The OECD’s findings imply that repositioning is happening unevenly rather than through a single broad retreat from cross-border production. That has direct implications for how governments approach industrial policy, de-risking and resilience. If aggregate change is limited but country heterogeneity remains substantial, then policy responses based on an assumption of wholesale collapse in global integration may miss the more specific shifts that are actually taking place.
The brief also points to the continued “servicification” of manufacturing exports, meaning that services remain increasingly embedded in goods trade. That is a significant point for Europe, where debate on industrial competitiveness often still focuses on visible manufacturing output rather than on the services content that underpins production, logistics, design, finance and other high-value activities. The OECD says the brief also examines how economies are positioned along forward and backward global value chain linkages, adding another layer to how trade dependence and strategic exposure are measured.
There is also a methodological element to the release. The OECD says the brief includes a post-mortem evaluation of its 2024 nowcasting exercise, looking at predictive accuracy and areas where the method can be refined. That matters because trade policy is increasingly being shaped by fast-moving political decisions, while the underlying data often arrive with delay. A nowcasting framework is intended to narrow that gap by producing earlier estimates, even if those estimates remain experimental.
For Brussels, the timing is relevant. The European debate on economic security has increasingly been framed around resilience, diversification and reduced dependence in strategically sensitive sectors. The OECD brief does not dismiss those concerns. But its findings do suggest that the underlying structure of global value chains is changing more gradually, and more unevenly, than some of the sharper political narratives imply. That gives the publication immediate policy value: it offers a more measured evidence base at a time when governments are under pressure to act quickly.
The broader OECD trade page places the brief within a wider body of work on global value and supply chains, which the organisation says account for about 70 per cent of international trade as services, raw materials, parts and components cross borders, often multiple times. Against that backdrop, the 8 April publication does not point to the end of globalisation. It points instead to a more differentiated phase in which resilience, efficiency and strategic adjustment are all being pursued at once.
