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This paper examines the divergent trajectories of automotive investment and employment in Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. Located on opposite shores of the Detroit River, in the United States and Canada respectively, Detroit and Windsor are the founding cities of the North American auto industry. Long dominated by the Big Three, their factories have produced vehicles for the same continental market since 1965. Each has weathered parallel challenges since then, including spikes in the price of oil, the Big Three's loss of market share, the transition to lean production, and the near-collapses of Chrysler and GM. Yet Detroit began deindustrializing decades earlier and lost much more employment than Windsor. To determine why, we compared their automotive sectors from 1900 to the 2010s. Since the Depression, each city has repeatedly confronted the prospect of deindustrialization, but three factors have made Windsor more resilient: (1) federal and provincial interventions on its behalf, (2) Windsor's greater competitiveness with respect to factor costs, quality, and innovation, and (3) Windsor's annexation of outlying territory to capture new factories. These differences show how national, subnational, and regional/local policies have mediated corporate decision-making to produce a variegated North American Rust Belt, with Canada outperforming the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper finds that conditional convergence in per capita incomes, as a robust empirical regularity across countries, is absent in the post-1989 globalization era. The results show that conditional convergence is subject to some initial, returns-adjusted level of education, implying that it has become more challenging for developing countries to industrialize via technology catch-up from abroad. The lack of conditional convergence, together with the increasing importance of education, complements another strand of literature that provides evidence of growth-reducing structural change, a growing technology gap due to the skill-intensive nature of manufacturing, and their link to the premature deindustrialization phenomenon observed in many developing countries since 1990. To draw an explicit link between the lack of conditional convergence in the post-1989 period and the literature on premature deindustrialization, the analysis augments a Barro-type regression with the employment shares of manufacturing, agriculture and services. The results show that raising the employment share of manufacturing relative to agriculture and, especially, services, is the most effective way to induce conditional convergence and generate faster growth in per capita income. One implication of the lack of conditional convergence is that the growth accelerations observed in many developing economies since the late-1990s may not be sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors believe the nation must come to terms with the crisis that afflicted the rural and small town South as America deindustrialized in recent decades. The loss of manufacturing jobs was far greater than in the rest of the manufacturing belt. They offer a novel analysis as a start toward forming a solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some features of the development paths taken by Brazil and China (two member countries of the BRICS grouping) in the current context of the crisis of neoliberal globalization and transformation of the political and economic world order. The authors use Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ thesis to argue that newly emerging rural development (RD) dynamics in China and Brazil are part of a protective ‘countermovement’, driven by actors and institutions responding to the contradictions of the concentration and internationalization of agrifood systems. However, thedirectionand scope of these countermovements are still open; their transformative potential should be viewed in Gramsci’s terms as a struggle for hegemony the outcome of which depends on the concrete ‘balance of social forces’. First, the paper characterizes the impacts of China’s rise on Brazil’s development, which subsequently found its economy under threat of reprimarization and deindustrialization. The paper then sketches some stylized facts of production and consumption within the Brazil–China soy–meat complex, a key element of the current global food regime, with a focus on corporate control of the soy–meat value chain, and its negative consequences. Finally, the paper identifies the key roles that actors and institutions linked to peasants and family farmers are playing in the RD dynamics of each country. Although China and Brazil represent two very different realities, the comparison shows that critical rural and agrifood issues are indeed moving onto the centre stage of the contemporary ‘double movement’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses affects of globalization, urbanization and deindustrialization in the twenty-first century, which are rapidly changing contemporary local economies, forcing cities across the world to adopt advanced information and communication technologies. Topics discussed include knowledge-based urban development (KBUD), issues related to economic prosperity, environmental sustainability and good governance to cities, and retain high-skilled workers and innovative companies.

Taiwan has experienced a structural change in the labour market since 1996 due to intensified globalization, the trend towards deindustrialization and the increasing outflow of foreign direct investment, particularly to China. The unemployment rate has increased more than 2% since 1996 and reached approximately 5% in 2002 and 2009. A series of policy measures have been adopted to address the unemployment problems. The economic development model of Taiwan had been characterized as ‘growth with equity’. The country enjoyed a low unemployment rate and dramatic economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the structural changes resulting from globalization and deindustrialization pose huge challenges to the labour market in Taiwan. This article evaluates the outcomes of the policy measures enacted since 2000 to address the problem of unemployment and poverty. Taiwan's work–welfare nexus and governing system will be compared with that of other East-Asian countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the decline of the Danish shipbuilding industry. European shipyards dominated global shipbuilding markets in the first half of the twentieth century, but began to be challenged by the Japanese from the 1950s and by the South Koreans from the late 1970s. More recently, China has taken over large slices of the global shipbuilding market and currently is the world's largest shipbuilding nation. As a result of this new competition, European shipyards closed en masse and Europe experienced a process of maritime deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 1980s. Danish shipyards were not immune to these challenges, although maritime deindustrialisation in this country was almost two decades later than in many other European countries. This article examines how Denmark was able to escape this general maritime deindustrialisation for so long and offers three explanations: institutional, entrepreneurial and political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a novel extension of unequal exchange theory, this study analyzes how international trade affects per-capita incomes and employment patterns in affluent countries. The study begins by demonstrating that workers in less-developed countries are significantly underpaid relative to their labor productivity, and that this outcome causes the monetary values of goods exported from these countries to underestimate the actual amount of labor inputs embodied within them. From this observation, it is hypothesized that North-South trade, unlike North-North trade, should increase per-capita incomes in affluent countries, while also reducing employment in their manufacturing sectors. Using a simultaneous equations model, the study compares this theoretical expectation to the actual experiences of 18 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries between 1970 and 2003. The results are generally consistent with expectations. The study concludes by discussing the theoretical implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

large part of the work in economic geography and other social sciences has focused on new growth prospects due to the establishment of global production chains and the rise of new clusters of industrial activity. Much less attention has been paid to former growth industries and regions that have recently experienced shrinking processes due to internationalization. This paper will explore the cases of two chemical regions, i.e. southern Hessen, Germany and Rhone-Alpes, France. These two areas have both undergone drastic restructuring since the mid-1990s, due to the merger of the prominent chemical groups Hoechst and Rhone-Poulenc into Aventis. Instead of investigating the development of the core activities at Aventis, we will focus on the operations that were considered less important and consequently split off. In addition to the negative consequences produced by these activities, in our analysis we also emphasize regional opportunities which arise from competence building, reorientation and new firm formation. These processes can be viewed as re-bundling existing and new knowledge bases with other resources to help overcome economic crises and develop a new competitive edge. As such, the paper aims to contribute to a relational understanding of economic globalization and regional restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies exist of the role of business and professional services (BPS) in second city regions that have experienced significant levels of deindustrialisation. The case for enhancing our understanding of the dynamics of BPS firms in the economy of a second city suggests that it is timely to explore their geography and structural dynamics outside global city regions. Structural and firm determinants of competitive advantage and disadvantage are identified and explored using the Birmingham city region (UK) as a case example employing evidence from a survey of BPS firms undertaken in 2002. The determinants of the sustainability of BPS firms in the context of Birmingham's position as the UK's second city, the growth of inter-regional trade in BPS, and the internationalisation of their markets is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]