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The shift to electric mobility is driving disruptive transformations in the automotive sector worldwide. It poses significant but different opportunities and challenges to incumbents and latecomers at both the firm and country levels. China's green industrial policy has facilitated its rapid catching up and even leapfrogging in some domains of electromobility. This article asks whether the exploitation of this window of opportunity can be replicated in other latecomer countries. Accordingly, it provides a comparative analysis of the automotive green window of opportunity in Brazil, India, and South Africa, three emerging economies with long established but structurally different automotive industries. To do so, it examines domestic preconditions, policy and enterprise responses, and preliminary industrial development outcomes. Although all the three countries face constraints in replicating China's relative success, the article shows how green opportunities and threats are unequally divided between the three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International trade in the 21st century operates through global value chains (GVCs). There is a growing literature on how the emergence of GVCs has changed the playing field for catch-up industrialization of developing countries. Inter-industry linkages have historically been a central aspect of catch-up industrialization. How such linkages on the country level are affected by the reality that trade is conducted via GVCs is an important research question. This paper synthesizes the theoretical elaborations on inter-industry linkages from the classic development economics literature with secondary empirical data from the East Asian industrialization experience to illustrate the importance of inter-industry linkages for the industrialization process. Using primary data from the South African automotive industry, the paper shows how the dynamics of the automotive GVC have affected domestic inter-industry linkage building in the country. The backward linkages to the domestic component manufacturing industry and to the domestic materials industries from South Africa's successful integration into the automotive GVC have been disappointing. Both local policy decisions as well as GVC-specific dynamics of follow sourcing and the proliferation of manufacturing technologies and material standards have undermined more substantial backward linkages from exports of automobiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and geopolitics on geographies of production. Criticizing simplified perspectives on globalized versus intraregional production, we stress the multi-scalarity, the role of industrial policies and sector-specific path dependencies in shaping global production. Based on expert interviews and policy and industry documents, our analysis focuses on the automotive, clothing, and electronics industries. Although concerns for resilience increasingly shape lead firms’ strategies, increased regionalization of production through re- or near-shoring is only one of several strategies. Where it does occur, it has been driven by state policies that tackle certain strategically important products, not production networks as a whole. Hence, while recent events exposed the vulnerabilities of global production, we do not observe deglobalization in the sense of a comprehensive retreat from globalized in favor of intraregional production. Nonetheless, state interventions that are geopolitically motivated and affect firms’ investment decisions have intensified particularly in the United States and the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]