Global value chains resilient despite obstacles: Report

Globalization seen far from over

Global value chains (GVCs) have been resilient in the face of rising geopolitical tensions, financial uncertainty, climate pressures and the Covid-19 pandemic according to the GVC Development Report 2025 launched at the WTO this week. Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said at the launch event that forward-thinking approaches are vital amid the ongoing shifts to ensure more people and economies are integrated into GVCs.

“This new report has reaffirmed something we at the WTO have been saying: Globalization is far from over, and global value chains remain indispensable. The share of GVC trade in global total has declined only marginally from its 2022 peak of 48%, to 46.3% last year,” DG Okonjo-Iweala said at the Geneva launch event for the publication titled “GVC Development Report 2025: Rewiring GVCs in a Changing Global Economy.”

“Firms and governments are not retreating from global integration, but reconfiguring it to meet new economic, political, and social priorities. This goes in the same direction of what we have been pushing for under the banner of ‘re-globalization’: a re-imagined globalization that helps to diversify global value chains and uses it to bring more economies that were on the margins of the global economy into the mainstream,” DG Okonjo-Iweala said.

The report, the fifth in this biennial series, is a joint publication of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Research Institute for Global Value Chains at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), the Institute of Developing Economies - Japan External Trade Organization (IDE-JETRO), the World Economic Forum, and the WTO Secretariat, as per a release.

It finds that the rewiring - or reorganizing - of GVCs is occurring through multiple dimensions: geographic reconfiguring; technological transformation through digitalization and automation; governance innovation through new industrial policies and new forms of targeted trade agreements; and environmental restructuring through green investment and carbon pricing mechanisms.

The data and evidence mainly cover up to the end of 2024 and pre-date recent tariff hikes and associated uncertainty in 2025; however, the report notes that data at the time of publication in December 2025 suggest that trade growth has remained robust.

“We have seen policy-driven increases in trade costs and a sharp increase in policy uncertainty. These are particularly burdensome for marginalized regions that lack an established track record of hosting multinational production,” DG Okonjo-Iweala said, adding the persistent shortages of trade finance amounting to more than US $1 trillion annually as another challenge.

“Such factors add up and are a major reason why the report finds that the ongoing rewiring of GVCs has mostly benefited countries that were already established as suppliers. If GVCs are to become more de-concentrated, diversified, and resilient, we need to be more creative about overcoming such obstacles,” she said.

“The report contains valuable lessons in this regard. It shows that governance cooperation has continued, though less in the form of traditional bilateral and regional agreements, viand by more informal, often non-binding, issue-specific frameworks. For instance, the report identifies more than 180 targeted trade deals with a focus on digital trade and critical minerals signed as of 2024. These arrangements can help build trust and predictability in the new governance landscape,” DG Okonjo-Iweala said.

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