This article presents a framework for analyzing economic integration and its relationship to the asymmetries of economic and social development. It argues for a research agenda that is more suitable for understanding the complexities of globalization than traditional development studies. The framework proposed is the 'global production network' (GPN), which explores the conceptual elements involved in this framework and provides a stylized example of a GPN. The article concludes with a brief indication of the benefits that could be delivered by research informed by GPN analysis. The analysis of economic development has been hindered by analytic disjunctions, leading to work at macro or meso levels of abstraction or, where empirical investigations have probed micro level processes, the larger analytic picture has often been absent. While there are notable exceptions, the central agent in development has often been perceived as the state. Although the significance of labor, gender, and other social movements, as well as international agencies, have been recognized, the analytic space given to development actors other than these has been limited. The article highlights the limitations of traditional state-centric approaches and the need for a more comprehensive framework that accounts for the dynamics of uneven development at transnational, national, and subnational levels. It argues that research informed by GPN analysis can better understand the flows and places and their dialectical connections in both developed and developing worlds. The article also emphasizes the importance of studying what firms do, where they do it, why they do it, and how they organize the doing of it across different geographic scales. The article outlines the GPN framework, which is not a totalizing framework but is capable of delivering a better analytic understanding of the changing international distribution of production and consumption and the viability of different development strategies. It discusses the conceptual elements of the GPN, including value, power, and embeddedness, and highlights the importance of these elements in understanding the dynamics of economic development. The article also discusses the significance of firm ownership, the role of institutional power, and the importance of territorial and network embeddedness in understanding the development processes. The article concludes with a discussion of the benefits that GPN research could deliver in understanding the complexities of economic development.This article presents a framework for analyzing economic integration and its relationship to the asymmetries of economic and social development. It argues for a research agenda that is more suitable for understanding the complexities of globalization than traditional development studies. The framework proposed is the 'global production network' (GPN), which explores the conceptual elements involved in this framework and provides a stylized example of a GPN. The article concludes with a brief indication of the benefits that could be delivered by research informed by GPN analysis. The analysis of economic development has been hindered by analytic disjunctions, leading to work at macro or meso levels of abstraction or, where empirical investigations have probed micro level processes, the larger analytic picture has often been absent. While there are notable exceptions, the central agent in development has often been perceived as the state. Although the significance of labor, gender, and other social movements, as well as international agencies, have been recognized, the analytic space given to development actors other than these has been limited. The article highlights the limitations of traditional state-centric approaches and the need for a more comprehensive framework that accounts for the dynamics of uneven development at transnational, national, and subnational levels. It argues that research informed by GPN analysis can better understand the flows and places and their dialectical connections in both developed and developing worlds. The article also emphasizes the importance of studying what firms do, where they do it, why they do it, and how they organize the doing of it across different geographic scales. The article outlines the GPN framework, which is not a totalizing framework but is capable of delivering a better analytic understanding of the changing international distribution of production and consumption and the viability of different development strategies. It discusses the conceptual elements of the GPN, including value, power, and embeddedness, and highlights the importance of these elements in understanding the dynamics of economic development. The article also discusses the significance of firm ownership, the role of institutional power, and the importance of territorial and network embeddedness in understanding the development processes. The article concludes with a discussion of the benefits that GPN research could deliver in understanding the complexities of economic development.