Contractual Networks and the Access of Small and Medium Enterprises to Global Value Chains

In the last three decades, the organisation of production has undergone major transformations, characterised by the movement from vertical integration towards de-verticalisation, with the increasing of outsourcing and internationalisation of production. Among the most important consequences of the recent re-structuring of global production organisation, we can find, on the one hand, the creation of new opportunities for developing countries to participate in the international market and obtain access to the new GVCs and, on the other, the development of new contractual practices and new models of collaboration among firms, including networks. Through a case study of the commercial aircraft industry in Brazil, this paper has, as its aims, (i) an analysis of the role of contractual networks, in particular, the contractual network of multilateral contracts, as an instrument to promote the access of developing countries’ SMEs to the GVC, and increase the benefits that they can derive from it, and (ii) to examine the problems regarding the lack of the proper legal tools to regulate the different forms of inter-firm collaboration represented by contractual network