Global Value Chains Outlook 2026: Orchestrating Corporate and National Agility

Executive Summary

Global supply chains stand at a historic inflection point. After decades defined by scale, cost optimization and globalization, a new era has emerged – shaped by fragmentation, systemic constraints and continuous disruption. The world has shifted from predictable integration to structural volatility. The assumptions that once made supply chains efficient – institutional stability, network predictability and open trade – have become sources of fragility. Rising geopolitical tensions, national industrial policies and uneven growth demand a profound re-architecting of how industries design their production networks and how governments shape enabling ecosystems. The “Global Value Chains Outlook 2026” builds on a multi-year collaboration between the World Economic Forum and Kearney and draws insights from more than 100 consultations with industry, government and academic leaders, survey data from over 300 global executives and real-world case examples. It offers a dual playbook to navigate this new operating environment:

– For the private sector: A strategic guide to orchestrate operations with foresight, agility and trust to turn uncertainty into advantage.

– For the public sector: A policy blueprint to build the enabling environment where adaptive, future-ready industries can thrive.

Five interlocking structural forces are redefining the outlook for global supply chains. Slowing and uneven growth, driven by inflation, tighter capital and widening divergence, is forcing companies to redesign networks around constrained supply, energy and localized demand.

Fragmentation and geopolitical volatility are accelerating as trade barriers, industrial policy and ongoing conflicts fracture globalization into competing blocs anchored by the United States (US), China and the European Union (EU). Technological acceleration, led by advances in AI, quantum computing and automation, is redefining productivity and reshaping how industries compete. And finally, trust has become the new currency as public scrutiny and national alignment intensify, making transparency, data integrity and credibility strategic imperatives.

Individually, each of these forces is disruptive; together, they are systemic and rewriting how the world sources, produces and delivers. The result is an environment in which uncertainty is structural, not cyclical and where the outlook for global value chains will be more transactional, more volatile, more fragmented and, in some cases, more degraded than anything global leaders have experienced in the past four decades. This reality demands a new leadership logic for business and policy: foresight over forecasting, orchestration over control and agility over efficiency.

Winning supply chains in this context are shifting from centralized control to decentralized intelligence – from linear, vertically managed systems to interdependent networks of suppliers, customers, regulators, financiers and digital platforms. Competitive advantage now depends not on end-to-end control, but on orchestrating value, trust and data across networks far beyond direct ownership. This demands action from both business and government.

For corporate leaders, competitive advantage in this environment will rest on three interconnected supply chain imperatives:

1. To become an ecosystem orchestrator, not end-to-end operator: Aligning diverse ecosystems of suppliers, customers, innovators and regulators around shared outcomes.

2. To build distributed scale, not concentrated scale: Constructing modular, technology- enabled networks that balance efficiency with adaptability and leverage economies of skill, not just scale.

3. To design optionality for growth, not redundancy for risk mitigation: Embedding optionality, flexibility and intelligence to capture upside opportunities amid disruption.

For policy-makers, this report introduces a policy blueprint that defines the foundations of an industrial ecosystem and supply chain competitiveness by outlining leading targeted policies and interventions across seven readiness factors. Building on these, sustained progress will rest on institutional readiness. The ability to turn policy vision into execution will define which economies attract investment, innovation and trust.

A new analytic tool introduced in this report, the Manufacturing and Supply Chain Readiness Navigator, provides a shared, data-driven compass for the same readiness factors for both government and industry leaders. It is designed to support companies in decision-making on the design of their global footprints; and for governments to diagnose industrial competitiveness gaps, target high-impact reforms and communicate progress credibly to global investors.

Private and public leaders now share a mandate to re-architect supply chains for structural uncertainty. The outlook ahead for global value chains will not be defined by those who anticipate disruption, but by those who design through it – turning volatility into momentum for growth and building the structural agility to thrive on the very uncertainty that others fear.