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Global value chain (GVC) participation has transformed many lines of business. The benefits it provides in terms of greater specialization and technology diffusion, however, do not spread identically across countries and industries. This paper shows that taking into account the functional specialization helps to explain how the benefits of GVC participation are distributed. Using data for 35 industries in 40 countries in 2000-2011, we estimate the impact of GVC participation on value added within a production function framework. The results indicate that there is heterogeneity in the effects of GVC participation, according to the functional specialization of the respective industry and its GVC partners. Participating in R&D-related GVCs is especially profitable for fabrication-oriented industries and low-developed countries. It follows that any GVC participation analysis will be incomplete if it fails to take the functional specialization of the GVC participants into consideration.

Business R&D spending has been showed to exert a positive direct as well as indirect, spillover effects on value added. Nevertheless, heterogeneity of the returns to R&D has been seldom examined. Using detailed sectoral data from Czechia over the period 1995-2015, this study finds that privately funded business R&D has both direct and spillover effects, but that the publicly funded part of business R&D only leads to spillovers. The results further suggest that both upstream and downstream spillovers matter, regardless of the source of funding, and that the R&D returns were heavily affected by the economic crisis. Lastly, private R&D offers significant returns only after reaching a critical mass, while the effects of public R&D spending do not profess such non-linearity. The heterogeneity of returns to business R&D needs to be reflected in the design of innovation policy.