Environmental upgrading and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

This paper, through a systematic literature review, seeks to verify how the literature identifies the relationship between company's integration into the global value chain and environmental upgrading. The purpose is to evaluate if the literature presents a favorable or unfavorable view of the relationship between company's GVC and environmental upgrading using as a guide six of the 17 United Nations environment-related Sustainable Development Goals to propose a more in-depth understanding of perspectives addressed by the scholars. A survey of two databases identified eighty-four articles addressing the issue and found that the view of integration into global value chains from the standpoint of environmental upgrading is favorable at the country level but unfavorable at the sector level. The overall result presents an unfavorable outlook for environmental upgrading. The results show that the production displacement resulting from the fragmentation of activities also transferred environmental concerns and consequences, making environmental upgrading a critical issue. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.