Specialization in natural resources and global value chains

Abstract The paper proposes to characterize specialization in natural resources in the context of changes in international trade. In 1995 and 2009, the mapping, carried out from the decomposition of exports and cluster analysis, pointed to the strengthening of the regional productive integration of the countries. Countries in North America, Europe and Asia are inserted into value chains, while the Latin American countries, as well as South Africa, Saudi Arabia, among others, are limitedly integrated into international production networks as suppliers of raw materials with low capacity to extract value from the production chains in which they are inserted. The challenge for countries with natural resources is that they still have traditional trade patterns, therefore it is necessary to break the technical constraints of the industry, developing the process industry in order to insert these countries into more advanced stages of the production chain.