TITLE:
A Comparative Analysis of the Export Technological Complexity of China, Japan, and South Korea from the Perspective of Global Value Chains
AUTHORS:
Mike Amable, Mei Yin, Ting Zhu
KEYWORDS:
Global Value Chain, Export Technology Complexity, Domestic Value Added, Markov Transition Analysis
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.13 No.10,
October
27,
2026
ABSTRACT: Traditional export-complexity measures rely on gross export values and overlook the global division of labor, so they may misjudge the technological content of a country’s exports. This paper builds a value-added-based export technology complexity index for China, Japan, and South Korea from a global value chain (GVC) perspective. Using the OECD Trade in Value Added (TiVA) database (2023 edition; 45 industries; 1995-2020), the index weights industries by the domestic value added contained in exports, so that foreign value added embodied in imported intermediate inputs receives no weight, and adjusts industry values with domestic input-output coefficients. The index is computed at three levels: a country-wide index (country-year observations), industry-level indices for three selected industries (country-industry-year observations), and a panel of 135 country-industry units used in a Markov transition analysis. China’s country-wide index was the highest of the three in 17 of the 26 years (1995-2007, 2015-2017, and 2020), South Korea’s was highest in the other nine (2008-2014 and 2018-2019), and the three converged by 2020; China’s compound annual growth (5.1%) was slower than South Korea’s (5.7%) and Japan’s (6.6%), and log-linear trend tests confirm this difference, also when 2009 and 2020 are excluded. Using terciles of the pooled index and five-year transitions, China’s high tier is the most persistent (0.87), whereas its medium tier is less persistent (0.41) and more likely to fall (0.33) than Japan’s or South Korea’s. The analysis is descriptive: it documents differences in the index and its persistence and does not test whether GVC embeddedness causes higher export technology complexity.