Retailer Suppliers and Global Value Chains in the Agri‐Food Sector

ABSTRACT The present paper investigates the link between the decision of French agri‐food firms to join a retailer supply chain and their integration in global value chains (GVCs) as direct importers and exporters. We identify the former with the choice to supply private label (PL) products, and the latter with the decision to jointly export and import. We use a multivariate binary choice model to investigate the link between these strategies. We combine firm‐level data from the AMADEUS database, French customs, and the exhaustive list of French firms certified with the private International Featured Standard (IFS) over the period 2006–2011. Our results show that firms in a retailer supply chain (IFS‐certified firms) are almost twice (by 5.83 percentage points) more likely to integrate GVCs than other firms in the sector. These results are robust to different types of controls and are confirmed by alternative estimation approaches.