Search

Research on the strategic coupling between regions and global lead firms has largely assumed that the regional assets for coupling are ready made and are largely unchanging throughout the coupling process. This article takes this assumption as its critical point of departure and presents a new framework that considers how regional assets are actively (re)configured across multiple scales in ways that could redefine the prevailing mode of strategic coupling. The empirical basis of this framework is derived from a long-term case study on the formation and evolution of Sino-German production networks in environmental goods and services (EGS) in Jieyang, a relatively peripheral city in Guangdong province in China. The analysis draws from thirty-three interviews and seven focus group discussions, conducted between 2014 and 2020, with nonstate and state actors in Jieyang. Findings highlight how Zhongde, a coalition of Jieyang-based firms, transcended the limitations of structural coupling, which exemplifies uneven power relations between regions and lead firms, and attained more balanced coupling relations with German-led EGS global production networks (GPNs) through realigning interests with those of national-level institutions. Responding positively to the structural constraints and opportunities within a Chinese state structure based on experimental governance, Zhongde connected German EGS lead firms to the highly profitable but protected EGS market in China. This ability to jump between scales underscores the cross-scalar and dynamic aspects of strategic coupling: Zhongde was able to meet German-led EGS GPNs’ demand for market access and enhanced localization economies through reconfiguring regional assets. Abstracting from these findings, the article enhances the explanation of the evolution of strategic coupling by conceptualizing its intrinsic dynamism and incorporating state structural effects. Finally, it presents two directions for further research on GPN reconfigurations.

This study presents a new method to analyse the impact of exogenous shock and its transmission mechanism within the global production network, based on scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic. We decompose domestic and international technology spillovers and introduce them into an economic growth model to investigate the elasticities of factor inputs and knowledge spillovers through industrial linkages, and eventually estimate a model with spatial specifications. The results from the scenario simulations suggest that the global total output is projected to fall by 3.60% and 8.41% under the V-shaped and L-shaped recovery scenarios, respectively, and that the propagation through input-output linkages is an important channel that causes global economic fluctuations. Economies at the hub of the production network, that is, the United States, China, and Germany, are the most seriously affected. Structural decomposition analysis results indicate that the shortage of intermediate inputs supply is the main driver of output decline, followed by the blockage of technology diffusion, and lastly, the reduction of labour supply. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Over the last few decades, the changing nature of global production and distribution processes has raised a number of critical questions regarding work and employment relations. Presenting a qualit...

Drawing upon the notion of lock-in in evolutionary economic geography perspective and concept of market imperative in global production network 2.0 theory, this study explores the role of market im...

Part I: Stylised facts of Global Value Chains (GVCs) Concept – Structure – Formation – Impacts Part II: Modeling Learning & Upgrading in Global Value Chains (GVCs) Motivation – Fundamentals – Conceptualisation – Structuralisation – Formation – Impacts

We quantify the role of global production linkages in explaining spillovers of U.S. monetary policy shocks to stock returns of 54 sectors in 26 countries. We first present a conceptual framework based on a standard open-economy production network model that delivers a spillover pattern consistent with a spatial autoregression (SAR) process. We then use the SAR model to decompose the overall impact of U.S. monetary policy on stock returns into a direct and a network effect. We find that up to 80% of the total impact of U.S. monetary policy shocks on average country-sector stock returns are due to the network effect of global production linkages. We further show that U.S. monetary policy shocks have a direct impact predominantly on U.S. sectors and then propagate to the rest of the world through the global production network. Our results are robust to controlling for correlates of the global financial cycle, foreign monetary policy shocks, and to changes in variable definitions and empirical specifications.

International audience; Indeed, the global production (as a system of creating values) is eventually forming like a gigantic and complex network/web of value chains that explains the transitional structures of global trade and development of the global economy. It’s truly a new wave of globalisation, and we term it as the global value chains (GVCs), creating the nexus among firms, workers and consumers around the globe. The emergence of this new scenario asks– how an economy’s firms, producers and workers connect in the global economy. And how are they capturing the gains out of it in terms of different dimensions of economic development? This GVC approach is very crucial for understanding the organisation of the global industries and firms. It requires the statics and dynamics of diverse players involved in this complex global production network. Its broad notion deals with different global issues (including regional value chains also) from the top down to the bottom up, founding a scope for policy analysis (Gereffi & Fernandez-Stark 2011). But it is true that as Feenstra (1998) points out, any single computational framework is not sufficient to quantification this whole range of economic activities. We should adopt an integrative framework for accurate projection of this dynamic multidimensional phenomenon.

The circular economy has become the latest proposal to reduce the effects of prevailing modes of production in the environment. Its premise—that by breaking a linear understanding of production and creating new economic niches the environmental impacts of an economy can be reduced to zero—has attracted numerous industries under the loop for their negative environmental effects. The scalar implications of such policies remain to be fully understood, particularly in what may imply for changing relationships between resource peripheries and consumption centers. This chapter explores the case of the salmon industry to examine these implications critically. The salmon industry is a global production network connecting production sites in the global south and north with markets in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The ecological impacts of salmon farming are significant, and global environmental networks have pushed for increasing certifications schemes, which include circular economy actions. Thus, it becomes an interesting case to put in dialogue arguments from resource peripheries literature on disarticulations and ecological contradictions, with circular economy arguments on sustainability.

The global value chain (GVC) perspective assumes that business firms’ occupation of high value-added nodes in the global production network can promote their countries’ socio-economic development. ...

Serial crises in the global economy have spurred renewed debate over contemporary transformations in geographies of uneven development. Global production network (GPN) studies have not been inured to this trend; indeed, in both geography and development sociology, a variety of approaches have emerged to grasp the multi-scaled, relational process of uneven development through the lens of global production. This progress report parses three of these: firm-centric scholarship that increasingly incorporates disinvestment and devaluation as an empirical ‘dark side’ to global production network participation; Marxist approaches that explore the evolving relationship between global inequality and global production; and neo-Marxist studies of regional conjunctures that highlight the constraints, contingencies and colonial legacies shaping uneven development in both long-standing and new ways. While their epistemological differences and normative assumptions are mostly incommensurable, more dialogue across these positions is nonetheless warranted if scholars are to grasp the vicissitudes upending received patterns of uneven development and portending uncertain futures.

Although the number of directions which geographical research on transport is taking has recently increased, the extent to which transport geography capitalises on theoretical advancements made in other sub-disciplines of human geography is still fairly limited. This especially pertains to economic geography which, in contrast to the predominantly positivist and quantitative transport geography, has developed over the last few decades a more post-positivist and qualitative profile. By means of focusing on passenger air transport – one of the most neglected industries in economic geography – this paper aims to help bridge this gap. Three under-researched aspects of air transport are identified and a combination of two economic-geographical approaches – global production networks (GPN) and evolutionary economic geography (EEG) – is advocated as a useful conceptual basis for further, more qualitative and more critical research on this dynamic sector. The paper argues that GPN and EEG would help research on air transport to: (1) employ network thinking beyond the infrastructural understanding of networks of air connections and thus better explain the multi-actor nature of the aviation sector, (2) complement the research on supra-national and national regulatory frameworks with more attention to the array of sub-national environments that shape the aviation industry ‘from below’, and (3) explore how the relations between aviation and economic development are moulded by different place-specific institutional factors. To lay foundations under further research the paper conceptualises the aviation industry as a global production network and uses the example of Polish passenger air transport to highlight the paper’s key empirical implications.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to calculate regional contents in the exports of the major regional blocs to the world, Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP), and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), respectively, to find the backward trade linkages between them instead of normal forward linkages. Design/methodology/approach To calculate “a region” content in intermediate and value-added exports, this paper uses OECD’s inter-country input-output table (ICIOT), and tries to decompose the contents of trade. Using the information of ICIOT, Koopman et al. (2014) and Wang et al. (2013) decompose gross exports of a country’s exports. Findings TPP is a loosely tied bloc featured by openness to the Asia-Pacific region. Trade linkages between members are stronger in RCEP than those in TPP, particularly in the trade of intermediate goods. Trades in RCEP are closely connected to exports to TPP, but the opposite direction is not clear. Research limitations/implications First of all, the recent base year of the data on value added in trade is 2011, which can be regarded as a little bit out of date. Therefore, it should be cautious in interpreting the results in that it may not reflect the characteristics of current trade. Second, this paper uses ICOIT instead of world input-output table. Practical implications A large portion of trades in RCEP and TPP is triggered by a global production network (fragmentation, vertical specialization), different from traditional trade focusing on inter-industry trade or competition between countries. Thus, the formation of TPP or RCEP is predicted to stimulate trade of the other instead of discriminating nonmember countries. Social implications In particular, the authors have special concern in the backward linkages between RCEP and TPP, the distinct characteristics of the two regional blocs and, finally, major countries’ preferences of the one over the other and industrial conflicts toward TPP or RCEP even in an economy. Originality/value Although this paper uses the approach by Baldwin and Lopez-Gonzalez, this paper is the first research on the analysis of the export contents in major trading blocs in the Asia-Pacific region.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of international trade in recent years is the rise of multistage global production networks in which firms fragment manufacturing production across borders by locating individual production stages in the countries where they can be performed at least cost (Jones in Globalisation and the theory of input trade. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 2000; Helpman in Understanding global trade. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 2011).

Even abolished, slavery is still practiced in the world. Through a literature review, this paper aims to analyze modern slavery in global production networks. We present definitions of modern slavery and contribute to increasing awareness of rethinking the favoring of the global economy to the detriment of modern slave laborers.

This paper examines global production networks through the lens of uneven development. Although originally concerned with asymmetries in the global economy, in the 1990s, global production network studies shifted decidedly towards a focus upon realizing the mutual benefits of engagement between multinationals, their suppliers, and the regions where the latter were located. Recent trends in supply chain restructuring, thrown into sharp relief by the 2008 financial crisis, have spurred more attention to the downsides of participation in global production networks, framed as empirical outcomes. Here, I explore this literature through the lens of three inter-related processes of uneven development: strategies to defer devaluation, regional disinvestment, and constitutive exclusion. Viewed from this perspective, the global production network can serve as a powerful heuristic device to grasp emerging forms of territorial and social unevenness in the global economy.

Global commodity chain, global value chain and global production network scholars have established the importance of studying lead firms and their business strategies to understand how new competitive pressures impact the organization of supply chains. In this analysis of the tobacco commodity chain, the author examines internal strategic planning documents for major cigarette manufacturers from 1960 to 2010 and identifies moments in which the lead firms shift competitive strategies. The article argues that these changes in inter-firm competition are linked, in part, to the changing demands, successes, and failures of the tobacco control movement. During each period, the movement shaped the particular opportunities and constraints facing Big Tobacco, which in turn changed the competitive dynamics amongst these firms, with important implications for other supply chain actors. This historical case of inter-firm competition among cigarette manufacturers reveals the importance of including powerful and enduring pressure groups in the study of global value chain governance – particularly global health movements and environmental movements that may have direct and indirect effects on global value chains above and beyond specific targeted campaigns.

International trade of intermediate goods has increased along with the development of the global production network. The contemporary debate is the opportunity to reap gain from economic globalization by linking production to global production network. Specific recent studies that identify the determinants of participation have evolved through a variety of methodologies, but consider less the economic shocks that occur. In its development, the global production network was also affected by the economic crisis in Asia in 1997/1998 and the economic shock of 2008/2009, which caused a contraction of trade. By using fixed effect regression with least square dummy variable model, this study aims to answer the question whether considering the contraction of trade as a structural break in the study will portray the close relationship between trade contraction and the participation of global production network. The results indicate that the economic crisis of 1997/1998 and the economic shock of 2008/2009 have a causal relation to the participation of the global production network.

Global commodity chain, global value chain and global production network (GCC/GVC/GPN) approaches (here simply labelled GVC analysis) are part and parcel of mainstream development theory and practice. This chapter introduces and discusses critically these approaches. It: (1) describes their utility in understanding globalizing processes; (2) traces their lineage and evolution; (3) highlights and explains their key concepts; (4) illuminates some of their limitations; and (5) identifies ways in which they can be advanced further.

Despite growing investment from leading automotive makers, particularly Japanese companies, the Indonesian automotive sector is still struggling to ensure decent work. This article makes a particular attempt to analyse the close links between Decent Work (DW) and Global Production Networks (GPNs) in the Indonesian automotive sector, whilst scrutinizing the existing literature that has covered the two concepts in separate frameworks. More specifically, this article examines the employment opportunities and adequate earnings of local employees within the DW framework in the country’s automotive sector with the expansion of GPNs. It finds that although there were greater opportunities for skilled workers to upgrade capabilities and enjoy improved welfare outcomes, there are still many more less-skilled workers remaining in precarious conditions.

This paper adopts the concepts of strategic coupling and upgrading—key notions in global production network theories—under an integrated evolutionary and relational economic geography approach. It aims to understand the role of trans-local networks in increasing the innovativeness of local firms and, as a consequence, in shaping the evolutionary path of a destination. Empirical evidence derives from interviews with key stakeholders, complemented with secondary data. In doing so, the paper examines the influence of alliances between local stakeholders and global intermediaries operating in the Russian market in a Catalan destination from 1994 to 2013. The nature and dynamics of the strategic coupling patterns identified— cooperative , mediated , self-interested , and captive —as well as their upgrading outcomes are discussed.

The “network” has gained widespread acceptance within economic geography as a metaphor for economic interaction. Consistent with a global production network (GPN) approach, extractive industries are deeply embedded in political structures, physical infrastructure, and environmental conditions. We advocate for a GPN framework that emphasizes the co-operation of multiple, differentiated networks at each stage of a production network. Furthermore, the physical geography of sub-national spaces as well as trans-national spaces linking resources with destination markets imposes critical constraints on the structure and operation of oil and natural-gas extraction. We attempt to move beyond notions of a singular network encompassing all aspects of production by contextualizing extractive activities within the geopolitical economy of Arctic Russia. Our aim is twofold: to develop a more carefully articulated conception of networks based on the different economic principles and political regulation at work within different types of networks, and to show how the Russian Arctic oil and gas sector can only be adequately understood with such a nuanced approach. The Arctic case illustrates well the complex entanglement of the state and political actors in networks of firms and specialized transport systems. We first deconstruct the network concept to establish the economic principles, actors, and spaces that comprise the extractive production network, and then examine the extractive hydrocarbon networks active in Arctic Russia through this analytical lens.

East Asia is known for its high intra-regional trade of intermediate goods and for its high inter-regional export of final goods in the manufacturing sector. The present study analyzes how this pattern changed between 1995 and 2009, by focusing on the ratio of value added through export of the intermediate goods with respect to value added induced by total exports (VSI) and the ratio of domestic value added due to final demand of the trading partner relative to total exports to that region (VAX). Using our new index of vertical specialization, VSI, we examine the extent to which the rise of the Chinese economy has changed East Asia's role in the global value chain. Our analysis shows that an increasing visibility of China in the global production network has been accompanied by a higher share of intermediate exports, even though China's VSI ratio is still lower than that of Japan or Korea. Meanwhile, the VAX ratio has fallen for all three countries in pairwise trade with one another, much faster than in inter-regional trade with other regions. Vertical specialization has progressed in the major exporting industries in China, Japan and Korea. This seems to reflect the strengthening ability of East Asia to create value added, in contrast to advanced countries in Europe and North America.

In the second half of the twenty century the U.S. economy went through important transformations in terms of both production and network structure between sectors, and also in terms of technology adoption. Using a network perspective we question how these changes in the inter-sector network structure have influenced the process of technology adoption. To address this issue we map Input-Output Use Tables from 1945-1995 into a weighted directed network. We found that: (i) the local and global production network properties are directly related to size of the local and global technology spillovers, (ii) the local and free global spillovers have, in general, a statistically significant and positive effect on technology diffusion, (iii) on the contrary, the controlled global technology spillovers captured by the network betweenness have, in general, a negative effect on technology diffusion, and (iv) both local and global incoming spillover effects tend to be relatively more important than the outgoing spillovers.

The patterns and dynamics of contemporary financial capitalism are mirrored in micro-production structures of finance in international financial centres (IFCs). Applying the global production network framework allows for analyses of these structures in greater detail, better illuminating the industry’s organization, its locally anchored professional practices, and the far-reaching power relationships between IFCs. The example of the IFC Luxembourg, the world’s largest cross-border investment fund centre, shows that, in particular, advanced business services firms facilitate the global reach of investment funds (i) in their close collaboration with both local and global financial corporations, and (ii) in their exploitation of localized arbitrage assets.

This paper introduces the Special Volume on sustainable and responsible supply chain governance. As globalized supply chains cross multiple regulatory borders, the firms involved in these chains come under increasing pressure from consumers, NGOs and governments to accept responsibility for social and environmental matters beyond their immediate organizational boundaries. Governance arrangements for global supply chains are therefore increasingly faced with sustainability requirements of production and consumption. Our primary objectives for this introductory paper are to explore the governance challenges that globalized supply chains and networks face in becoming sustainable and responsible, and thence to identify opportunities for promoting sustainable and responsible governance. In doing so, we draw on 16 articles published in this Special Volume of the Journal of Cleaner Production as well as upon the broader sustainable supply chain governance literature. We argue that the border-crossing nature of global supply chains comes with six major challenges (or gaps) in sustainability governance and that firms and others attempt to address these using a range of tools including eco-labels, codes of conduct, auditing procedures, product information systems, procurement guidelines, and eco-branding. However, these tools are not sufficient, by themselves, to bridge the geographical, informational, communication, compliance, power and legitimacy gaps that challenge sustainable global chains. What else is required? The articles in this Special Volume suggest that coalition and institution building on a broader scale is essential through, for example, the development of inclusive multi-stakeholder coalitions; flexibility to adapt global governance arrangements to local social and ecological contexts of production and consumption; supplementing effective monitoring and enforcement mechanisms with education and other programs to build compliance capacity; and integration of reflexive learning to improve governance arrangements over time.

This article examines the role of the informal economy in e-waste management in India employing field research conducted in the National Capital Region in 2011/12. It analyses the spatial linkages of the Indian e-waste industry with the international network of waste transfer and treatment using the global production network (GPN) framework. The article asserts that an understanding of the nature and functions of the informal sector, based on its theoretical foundations, enriches the global value chain (GVC) and GPN analyses. This is demonstrated through an analysis and discussion of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) production and processing and the (in)efficacy of legislation regulating these activities. Finally, the article locates Indian waste processing within the global architecture of e-waste movement and management and reflects on diverse perceptions of waste.

Fold N. Value chain dynamics, settlement trajectories and regional development, Regional Studies. Global value chain (GVC) analysis has little to say about the interaction between regions and global chain dynamics. However, recent calls to address broader development issues have resulted in efforts to incorporate a spatial dimension in GVC analysis. Addressing this issue, the paper argues that GVC analysis needs to be combined with the examination of livelihoods at settlement level. Livelihood diversification – or lack thereof – indicates particular settlement trajectories that constitute regional development pathways. It is also suggested that the understanding of how regions are shaped by value chain dynamics will improve by adding elements from global production network (GPN) theory to the combined methodology, namely by an examination of territorial embeddedness and value (creation, enhancement, capture, distribution) at settlement level.

Incorporating the global production network approach and competitor analysis, this paper establishes an analytical framework with two hypotheses for the role of foreign multinational enterprises (FMNEs) in indigenous firms’ exports and domestic sales. First, the presence of FMNEs as a whole is likely to have a negative impact on indigenous firms’ domestic sales but a simultaneous positive impact on their exports in an emerging economy like China. Second, the presence of MNEs from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan (HMT MNEs) is more likely to generate this pattern of impact than MNEs from other countries (Other FMNEs). The foreign direct investment-led export strategy contributed to the dominance of the scenario described by the first hypothesis in China, while a higher degree of market commonality and resource similarity of HMT MNEs with that of indigenous Chinese firms than Other FMNEs leads to the second hypothesis. These novel hypotheses are tested and supported by a very large and recent firm-level panel dataset from Chinese manufacturing.

This paper focuses on the impact of a global production network on the local economy in which production is located, with a particular focus on labour. The network concerned involves knitwear production in Tiruppur, southern India. This has transformed the region surrounding Tiruppur as well as the town, as knitwear production has spread into the countryside. Many of those previously employed in agriculture have moved into knitwear manufacturing and associated activities. This paper uses data collected over a 30-year period in villages located 25–30 km north-west of Tiruppur to show how the local rural economy has changed as the knitwear sector has expanded. The knitwear industry has provided direct employment to a large number of people from less well-placed households, which now commute to work, and it has also pushed up wages in agriculture and other occupations, including those who are not directly related to the knitwear sector. Importantly, the impacts of the expansion of knitwear production have be...

This article seeks to argue that logistics services, and the independent logistics industry in particular, should be afforded much more attention within political economy approaches to the global economy. Widespread outsourcing processes and the increased sophistication of logistics provisions mean that the industry has arguably evolved beyond being a mere service input to occupying an integral and strategic role within many global industries. It is, therefore, intimately connected to debates about shifting governance regimes and upgrading dynamics within those industries. Conceptualising logistics from a global production network (GPN) perspective offers the potential for revealing both (1) the contribution of logistics providers to value and upgrading dynamics in client sectors and (2) the ways in which the logistics industry itself can be thought of as a multi-actor value-generation network with its own strategic and upgrading dynamics. The article distils the key contributions and limitations ...

The origins of this Special Issue lie in a stream organized at the International Labour Process Conference (ILPC) held in Stockholm in 2012. The editors' interest in this area emerged from work on the retail supply chain (Newsome, 2010), call centres and business process outsourcing (Taylor, 2010), and spatiality, work and employment (Rainnie et al., 2011). The underlying rationale for the stream was to attract papers that situated labour and the labour process within the global commodity chain (GCC), global value chain (GVC) and global production network (GPN) frameworks. The articles in this collection reflect different positions and divergent approaches in their attempt to integrate labour. We now provide some necessary context for understanding the debates with which they engage.

Current debates presume that devaluation of one country’s currency may transfer the production of imported intermediate goods to the devaluating country. This paper argues that in a global production network involving more than two countries in the production of fragments, this presumption may not hold. With a simple Ricardian model of fragmentation, this paper shows that the production of fragments can be transferred only if countries have close comparative advantage. Using data from the World Input Output Database, our model is found to be empirically supported.

This chapter traces the question of globalization and reviews the efforts from geographers to understand the spatiality of economic globalization. Specific efforts have been made to review four research areas, including transnational corporations, cross-border flows, consequence of global-local interactions and local response to economic globalization. This chapter also highlights the contributions of Chinese scholars in globalization studies. As the speed-up of China’s integration into the globalization process, Chinese scholars are capable of offering more insights into cross-border economic activities, regional integration and global governance. Roadmap for future research is therefore depicted to embrace this trend.

Buyer-driven and producer-driven commodity chain governance typologies are helpful in characterizing the relationships between buyers and suppliers engaged in transnational economic activity. However, what is missing in Global Commodity Chain (GCC) and Global Value Chain (GVC) analyses is an explanation of how governance structures change over time. In this paper I suggest that the production system associated with particular commodities is not the only factor shaping commodity chain governance. Rather, I argue that actors’ strategies, regulation, and historical trajectories also influence and, in certain conjunctures, transform chain governance. Since regulations and actor strategies in competitive environments change over time, it follows that chain governance is dynamic. Drawing from the case of the Dutch cut flower agro-industry, the world’s leading supplier of cut flowers, I build on the GCC, GVC and Global Production Network (GPN) literatures to illustrate how actor strategies, regulation an...

The transnational expansion of large retailers like Metro and Wal-Mart and its consequent power shifts have caused trade unions in the company's host countries of their expansion to react differently. These reactions include the de? velopment of international union networks, the organisation of employees in the new supermarkets and resistance against new competitors of old-established retailers. Unions are part of the extra-firm networks of global production networks and influence their development and spatiality. However, to develop collective power in a global production network, unions have to develop strategies that are able to overcome the spatial asymmetry between the transnationally organised companies and the place-bound labour. This paper analyses the strategies of the Indian union UNICOME (the Union for Commerce Employees in India) to develop collective power in a Global Production Network in the retail sector, namely the transna? tional retailer and wholesaler Metro. The case study shows how a union's greater power in the company's German home market was harnessed in order to develop collective power in India by means of network relationships.

This article explores the opportunities a GPN approach provides for understanding the network configurations and regional development impacts associated with extractive industries. The article elaborates two core claims: (i) that the application of the GPN analytical framework provides a way to make progress in a stalled policy debate regarding the linkages between resource extraction and socio-economic development (popularly known as the ‘resource curse thesis’); and (ii) that the encounter between GPN and a natural resource-based sector introduces distinctive issues—associated with the materiality and territoriality of extractive commodities—that, to date, GPN has not considered fully. The article examines the global production network for oil as an empirical case of how extractive industries can provide (limited) opportunities for socio-economic development.

I propose the following 'law of increasing productivity': the search for the highest levels of return on equity necessary to produce value for the shareholders and meet the expectations of the firms' stakeholders gives rise to an improvement process whose macro effect is increasing levels of productivity and quality. This paper will try to demonstrate that productivity is the basis of all productive systems, which are viewed as transformers of utility and value, since the search for maximum productive efficiency is necessary to reduce production costs and thus to produce value. After presenting a coherent frame of reference, I shall examine the drivers of productivity and then move on to discuss the consequences of the continual growth in productivity. The paper concludes with a simple but significant model that seeks to illustrate the relationship between productivity and employment.

Global value chain and global production network analyses have largely focused on dominance of Northern retailers over suppliers in the global South. The expansion of retailers within the global South sourcing from and supplying consumer end-markets within their own geographic regions is reconfiguring value chain dynamics. This paper draws on GVC and GPN approaches and the concepts of multi-polar governance to analyse changing dynamics of global and regional retail supply networks. Drawing on a case study of supermarket expansion within South and East Africa, it analyses how ‘waves of diffusion by global and regional supermarkets provide new opportunities for ‘strategic diversification’ by some horticultural producers and workers. It examines the implications for economic and social upgrading and downgrading, finding mixed outcomes. Strategic diversification provides opportunities for economic and social upgrading by more capable suppliers and skilled workers, but economic downgrading pressures persist and some are excluded from both global and regional value chains.

Although there has been a proliferation of writing recently on global commodity/value chains and production networks, labour and employment relations have been largely absent or conceived of in a limited manner in these discussions. As a counter to this, we argue for locating employment relations, labour and the labour process at the heart of analysis of both global production networks (GPNs) and of what we are calling global destruction networks (GDNs), which are networks through which commodities move at the purported ends of their lives. We argue that labour shapes the structure of both GPNs and GDNs. Through examining how GDNs - which often involve significant amounts of informal labour - are intimately connected to the operations of GPNs, we also challenge dualistic thinking that perceives some of the work involved in retrieving components from waste for reuse in GPNs as wasted labour'. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper examines the implications of cross-border production fragmentation in the context of regional integration, using both general- and partial-equilibrium approaches. It shows the conditions under which fragmentation converts a trade-diverting FTA into a trade creating one. It assesses the effect of fragmentation on the balance of payments and the sensitivity of trade flows to exchange-rate changes.

FELSENSTEIN D. (1997) The making of a high technology node: foreign-owned companies in Israeli high technology, Reg. Studies 31, 367‐380. This paper conceptualizes the role of Israel's high technology sector as that of a node in a global production network. A node can be characterized by the intensity of the incoming and outgoing flow of information, investments and so on, that pass through it. Foreign investment is one indicator of the centrality of a node. Using case study and aggregate firm level evidence of US foreign investment in Israeli high technology, the paper tests the hypothesis that foreign involvement in the node economy is based on a rather different set of forces than those suggested by the foreign investment literature. The results seem to indicate the importance of node-type factors such as the centrality of small firms in R&D activity and labour force stability, rather than the standard determinants such as incentives, labour costs and infrastructure. The implications and policy issues ...

When studies of industrial organisation are informed by commodity chain, actor network, or global production network theories and focus on tracing commodity flows, social networks, or a combination of the two, they can easily overlook the less routine trans-sectoral associations that are crucial to the creation and realisation of value. This paper shifts attention to identifying the sites at which diverse specialisations meet to concentrate and amplify mutually reinforcing circuits of value. These valorisation processes are demonstrated in the case of Australian Fashion Week, an event in which multiple interests converge to synchronize different expressions of fashion ideas, actively construct fashion markets and enhance the value of a diverse range of fashionable commodities. Conceptualising these interconnected industries as components of a trans-sectoral fashion complex has implications for understanding regional development, world cities, production location, and the manner in which production systems "touch down" in different places. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Although Malaysia has been an integral part of the international production fragmentation network since 1970, empirical investigations on the factors that determine the expansion of these networks are sparse. The paper examines the aforementioned empirical gap in the case of the Malaysian information, communications and telecommunications (ICT) sector using trade patterns in parts and components (PNC). Panel-data estimation from 1990 to 2008 suggests that mobile factors such as relative labor costs and productivity, foreign capital, agglomeration effect, infrastructure development and industrial policies are important in facilitating the international production fragmentation development. Income and domestic prices effect however, are conditional to trade flows.

The initial triggers of the Asian Crisis that resulted from an exposure to global financial markets are now well understood: research highlights endogenous failures of international capital markets1 and domestic policy failures, especially for financial regulation.2 It is time to move on to an analysis of possible responses. Elsewhere, I have analysed how the Crisis has reshaped the region’s longer-term industrial upgrading options (Ernst, 1998b, 2001d). In this paper, I focus on short-term responses and discuss a puzzle related to rapid trade adjustment.3