  International trade has been increasingly organized in the form of global
value chains (GVCs) where different stages of production are located in
different countries. This recent phenomenon has substantial consequences for
both trade policy design at the national or regional level and business
decision making at the firm level. In this paper, we provide a new method for
comparing GVCs across countries and over time. First, we use the World
Input-Output Database (WIOD) to construct both the upstream and downstream
global value networks, where the nodes are individual sectors in different
countries and the links are the value-added contribution relationships. Second,
we introduce a network-based measure of node similarity to compare the GVCs
between any pair of countries for each sector and each year available in the
WIOD. Our network-based similarity is a better measure for node comparison than
the existing ones because it takes into account all the direct and indirect
relationships between country-sector pairs, is applicable to both directed and
weighted networks with self-loops, and takes into account externally defined
node attributes. As a result, our measure of similarity reveals the most
intensive interactions among the GVCs across countries and over time. From 1995
to 2011, the average similarity between sectors and countries have clear
increasing trends, which are temporarily interrupted by the recent economic
crisis. This measure of the similarity of GVCs provides quantitative answers to
important questions about dependency, sustainability, risk, and competition in
the global production system.
