The GEAR members Ángela García-Alaminos, Fabio Monsalve and Jorge Zafrilla have recently published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology the paper entitled “Disentangling social impacts in global value chains through structural path analysis”.

This analysis proposes an analytical method to trace the precise pathways through which impacts from a specific origin are disseminated worldwide and embodied in high-income nations’ consumption.

Our work relies on a multi-regional input–output model extended with the structural path analysis (SPA) methodology. The SPA method is explored both in gross and net terms as complementary perspectives to disentangle the complexity of global value chains, which is the main contribution of our approach.

We take as a case study the forced labor in the two major worldwide cotton producers (India an China). Based on ILO data, we estimate that there are at least 32,000 and 55,300 persons being coerced into forced picking in China and India, respectively.

Our results show that more than 13% of the estimated forced workers are attributed to the European Union and the United States consumption, respectively, with apparel, footwear, and textiles as key goods embodying these workers.

Key findings show a high number of intrasectoral transformations inside the Chinese and Indian textile industries, which hinders the traceability of forced labour at the first stages of the fashion value chains. We also show that forced labor in the Chinese cotton industry is even more distant to the final consumer than usual unskilled labor, which is an additional obstacle to its eradication.

You can find the full-text here: