B. Lambregts

Clustering of Economic Activities in Polycentric Urban Regions: The Case of the Randstad

Local contexts are becoming more important as the impact of the process of globalisation on the spatial distribution of economic activities seems to generate not so much processes of homogenisation as of heterogenisation between regions in advanced economies. The combination of specialisation and spatial concentration of economic activity in advanced economies has attracted much attention from economists and geographers. Here, we explore at what level of spatial aggregation contemporary tendencies of clustering of economic activities articulate themselves within the archetypal polycentric urban region of the Dutch Randstad. To examine this question, we look at profiles of business start-ups in the individual cities of the Randstad. Our focus is on business start-ups as they respond most directly to the changes taking place in the economic environment and especially those regarding the supply of labour. Our findings point to the direction of cluster formation at a supraurban level. The profiles of business start-ups are clearly converging. A process of intraregional-i.e. at the level of the polycentric urban region-homogenisation with respect to new economic activities is taking place. Within the Randstad, notably a decreasing divide between a north wing and a south wing is revealed.

Between Accumulation and Concentration of Capital: Toward a Framework for Comparing Long-Term Trajectories of Urban Systems

In this article, we first seek to develop a more general framework to understand differences in long-term trajectories of urban systems. We use a model that has two dimensions: the level of accumulation of capital and the level of concentration of capital. We then use the model, very much in a heuristic way, to see what insights can be gained when applied to the concrete cases of the urban systems of London and the Dutch Randstad. As the data, especially for the pre-industrial and the industrial era, are still very scarce, this mapping of the long-term trajectories is still highly conjectural. What emerges quite clearly from this novel way of looking at urban development trajectories, though, is the divergence between the two global city regions. This divergence can be explained by the differences in the (pre-industrial) points of departure between London and the Randstad, but also by the difference of insertion in the global economy. A more detailed analysis of the Randstad in the post-industrial era shows that changes in the level of concentration of capital are clearly scale-sensitive; within the Randstad a clear tendency toward deconcentration while relative to the country as a whole the Randstad has maintained its position.

The local impact of globalization in South and Southeast Asia: offshore business processes in services industries

In the past two decades, several millions of IT-enabled services jobs have been relocated or ‘offshored’ from the US and Europe to, in particular, low cost economies around the world. Most of these jobs so far have landed in South and South-East Asia, with India and the Philippines receiving the bulk of them. This has caused profound changes in the international division of labour, and has had correspondingly wide social and economic effects. This book examines how this ‘next wave in globalization’ affects people and places in South and South-East Asia. It brings together twelve case studies from India, the Philippines, China, Hong Kong and Thailand, and explores how and for whom services offshoring creates opportunities, triggers local economic transformations and produces challenges. This book in addition compares how different countries take part in this ‘second global shift’, investigates service-sector driven economic development from a historical perspective, and engages with the question whether and to what extent services offer a new promising avenue of sustained economic growth for developing countries. It argues that service-led development in developing countries is not easy for all the workers involved, or a guaranteed path to sustained economic development and prosperity.

Competition and wage effects in the global online market for microwork and services outsourcing

Today, the competitive effects of globalization are no longer felt only at the level of the nation or the firm, but also directly by members of the labor force themselves. Technological developments facilitating outsourcing and offshoring of service activities gradually turn the world into a level playing field in which anyone can compete for work with anyone else regardless of his or her location (Friedman 2005). As a result, new, previously sheltered groups, particularly in Western labor markets, are now increasingly susceptible to direct competition from not only their domestic but also their international peers. If offshoring in the 1970s and 1980s mostly affected low-skilled blue-collar workers, many in the West are now expressing alarm that in today’s age of cheap telecommunications and declining barriers to distance, people in low-cost economies such as India can perform almost any job — whether high- or low-skilled — for a fraction of the wages in the West (Levy 2005). The critical divide in the future may be between types of work that are or are not easily deliverable through a wire (or wireless) and no longer between jobs that do or do not require high levels of education (Blinder 2006).