Cadenas globales de valor y sofisticación de la canasta de exportación en América Latina

The process of globalization has brought a major change in the international economy, and the scope of feasible trade between countries has broadened. Global value chains combine participation by geographically disperse suppliers in the production of modern manufactures characterized by an accelerated technical progress. Latin American countries have not played a leading role in this dynamic, with consistently low levels of export sophistication. This paper evaluates the level of Latin America’s export sophistication from a dynamic and comparative perspective. Its results confirm the starting hypothesis, but reveal different situations and trajectories. The work takes in the dimension of the dynamic of the export specialization pattern by product type (capital goods, primary inputs, processed inputs, consumer goods) in the period 2000-2007. In the products that describe the dynamics (i.e. that lose and gain specialization) the level of sophistication is always higher than goods with permanent specialization. In the margin, there may be evidence that these countries are participating in a recent process of export modernization, particularly in processed intermediate goods.