Timothy J. Sturgeon

Timothy J. Sturgeon

Senior Researcher, IPC

Timothy Sturgeon‘s research focuses on the processes of global integration and digital transformation, with an emphasis on offshoring and outsourcing practices in the electronics, automotive, and services industries. His work explores how evolving technologies and business models are altering linkages between industrialized and developing economies and development experiences more generally.

Sturgeon has more than 30 years’ experience in international economic development research and practice.
He is a co-founder of the Global Value Chain (GVC) research network and sub-field, which has become major area of study in international development with thousands of research papers and other publications in the past several decades years exploring the dynamics, impacts, and policy implications of participating in global production networks. Today, most governments and international development agencies actively consider how economies articulate within GVCs when formulating trade, investment, innovation, and skill development policies.
He has published books, journal articles, and reports with more than 27,000 citations on Google Scholar.
He has helped create several new official classifications to aid globalization research, including classifications in international trade for Business Functions, ICT-enabled Services, and the latest revision of the Broad Economic Categories in the Harmonized Tariff System
He has worked at the national level in Brazil, Canada, China, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines, Russia, South, Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, the USA, and Vietnam.
He has worked at the global and regional level, including ASEAN, APEC, EU, MERCOSUR, and USMCA.
He has worked with governments, industry associations and international development agencies including APEC, EUROSTAT, the European Commission, ILO, IDB, UNCTAD, UNIDO, World Bank, WTO, USAID, and the United Nations Statistics Division.

Impact: Tim’s research on outsourcing and offshoring in electronics manufacturing in the 1990s led to the publication of the article, “Modular Production Networks: A New American Model of Industrial Organization” in 2002, which has garnered nearly 2,500 citations in Google Scholar and is the third most cited article in the journal Industrial and Corporate Change. The growth of GVCs in the 2000s across multiple industries and jurisdictions raised a host of additional theoretical and policy questions, which led to the publication of “The Governance of Global Value Chains: An Analytic Framework” in Review of International Political Economy, co-authored with Gary Gereffi and John Humphrey, which has nearly 12,000 citations and is the most cited article in Review of International Political Economy by a factor of 2.76. More recently, in 2021, Tim published “Upgrading Strategies for the Digital Economy” in Global Strategy Journal, a paper that has already collected nearly 500 citations. These and other publications by Dr. Sturgeon and his colleagues have helped to establish GVCs as a dynamic and rapidly growing subfield crossing, among others, development studies, international political economy, industrial sociology, and economic geography.

In a culmination of this work Dr. Sturgeon recently completed Compressed Development: Time and Timing in Economic and Social Development with co-authors D. Hugh Whittaker, Tianbiao Zhu, and Toshie Okita for Oxford University Press. The book re-casts development theory to fit contemporary conditions, grappling with the speed of change and how this affects development experiences. Because compression has historically been a general tendency in successful developers — because societies can build on what’s come before — the book focuses on forces specific to recent history such as financialization, global value chains, and digitization. The book seeks to explain why most developers have not advanced to high income status, moving beyond narrow economistic treatments of the middle-income trap. And, as the sub-title suggests, the book takes a broad view of development, looking not only at the effects of compression on economies but also social development, including education, public health, and urbanization.

References:

Sturgeon, Timothy J. “Modular production networks: a new American model of industrial organization.” Industrial and corporate change 11.3 (2002): 451-496.

Gereffi, Gary, John Humphrey, and Timothy Sturgeon. “The governance of global value chains.” Review of international political economy 12.1 (2005): 78-104.

Sturgeon, Timothy J. “Upgrading strategies for the digital economy.” Global strategy journal 11.1 (2021): 34-57.

Whittaker, D. Hugh, Timothy J. Sturgeon, Toshie Okita, and Tianbiao Zhu. Compressed development: time and timing in economic and social development. Oxford University Press, 2020.

United Nations. (2023). Manual on the Classification of Business Functions. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Statistics Division. Statistical Papers Series F No. 125 (ST/ESA/STAT/SER.F/125)

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. (2015). International Trade in ICT Services and ICT-enabled Services. UNCTAD Division on Technology And Logistics, Science, Technology and ICT Branch, ICT Analysis Section. Technical Note No.3 (Tn/Unctad/Ict4d/03), October.

United Nations. (2018). Classification by Broad Economic Categories Rev.5; Defined in terms of the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (2012) and the Central Product Classification, 2.1. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Statistics Division. Statistical Papers Series M No. 53, Rev.5(ST/ESA/STAT/SER.M/53/Rev.5).