This paper mainly analyzed the spillover effect of GVC participation on economic growth and deconstructed it from the spatial perspective. It used the spatial Durbin model to study the impact of GVC participation on economic growth in 42 countries through empirical analysis, using the World Bank, WIOD, UIBE and other databases. The results are as follows: the improvement of a country’s GVC participation can effectively drive the development of its own economy and have a significant spillover effect on the economic development of its neighboring countries; The improvement of a country’s GVC status not only has a great promotion effect on its own economic development, but also has a relatively obvious promotion effect on the economic development of neighboring countries.

Most of the existing literature focuses on how international industrial transfer (IIT) impacts the global value chain (GVC) status of the manufacturing industry from the perspective of narrowly defined FDI but ignores the objective fact that FDI and IIT are not equivalent. Based on theory analysis, we used the TiVA database, the input–output model, and global value chain-related methods to effectively measure the scale of generalized IIT and GVCs of manufacturing sectors in China from 1995 to 2018. On this basis, the relationship between IIT and the GVCs of manufacturing industries and the moderating effect of green technological innovation (GTI) were empirically investigated using industry panel data. The results show that (1) there is a nonlinear inverted U-shaped relationship between IIT and manufacturing GVCs; that is, a larger IIT scale is not better from the perspective of manufacturing GVCs. (2) GTI weakens the inverted U-shaped relationship between IIT and manufacturing GVCs. (3) The heterogeneity analysis found that both medium- and high-technology manufacturing IITs have a nonlinear inverted U-shaped relationship with GVCs, which does not exist in low-technology manufacturing IIT. (4) The benchmark regression results remain robust after replacing the GVC measure, excluding special years and endogeneity treatment and replacing the estimation method robustness test. The research in this paper has implications for optimizing the design of IIT policies to promote the upgrading of manufacturing GVC status.