Claes G. Alvstam

The Ambiguous Role of the WTO in Times of Stalled Multilateral Negotiations and Proliferating FTAs in East Asia

Abstract The world trading system is characterized by a growing number of free trade agreements (FTAs). Limited progress in the negotiations at the multilateral level within the WTO has contributed to this development, inducing countries to seek faster, alternative ways to speed up liberalization, which make it possible to take advantage of preferential treatment with key trading partners. This article discusses what role the WTO should take with regard to FTAs in times of stalled multilateral negotiations and proliferating FTAs, and how FTAs can contribute to the multilateralization of regionalism. When results at the multilateral level are scarce, there may be a shift towards other alternatives in which the WTO is left out. This may force the WTO to function reactively, simply facing facts as an organization, rather than proactively, where it may play some role in shaping the FTA development. FTAs are not an entirely separate phenomenon from the WTO, since countries that negotiate FTAs play two roles. They are members of the WTO and as such are part of the work and negotiations of the organization. They are also part of trade arrangements that are limited to a smaller number of countries, and hence can negotiate against the interest of the entire multilateral organization. This article explores how these agreements can facilitate the work and negotiations of the WTO to regionalize bilateralism and multilateralize regionalism, here named the “sticky rice” approach. Various East Asian trade arrangements are used as empirical examples.

Upstream Control and Downstream Liberty of Action

This article deals with the issue whether the ambition by foreign TNCs to secure quality control, technology and knowledge exclusiveness, cost efficiency and delivery terms among its host country suppliers leads to a strategy to tie up the suppliers to a forced dependence on their customers. It is often assumed that the need by foreign TNCs to secure upstream control in the host country will lead to putting pressure on its local suppliers to limit contacts with competing clients and to become the dominant customer. Our empirical studies among Swedish TNCs, in Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam, show instead that the normal pattern was not to become the dominant client among its local suppliers. Rather than resulting in ‘captive’ governance structures, our findings suggest that in these types of value chains, ‘developmental’ buyer–supplier relations are likely, resulting in technological upgrading of less capable, domestic suppliers.

Concluding Remarks on Asian Inward and Outward FDI; New Challenges in the Global Economy

In this volume we have attempted to give a broad overview of the current scholarly debate around foreign direct investment (FDI) in emerging Asian countries, in which the main message has been to demonstrate that FDI flows — inward and outward — continuously take new directions, and change form incessantly. Despite several decades of multifaceted and successfully carried out research on FDI in different parts of the world — an endeavour that has broadened and deepened our knowledge of the complexities of international economic and political integration — reality has constantly impinged. Emerging market multinational enterprises feature new logics, and their activities are anchored in different institutional environments compared to the traditional firms, and demand accordingly new theoretical interpretations and explanations. The emerging market multinational enterprises should never be seen as a homogenous group, neither should companies from different Asian countries be scrutinized with the same glasses. Yet, there are indeed common aspects that motivate joint examination in the search for better explanation of past trends and enhanced predictability and probability of alternative future scenarios. The revealed heterogeneity between newly created multinational companies in various large emerging markets can also be seen as an appropriate starting point for the theoretical debate on intra-variations vs inner variations in the comparison with MNEs from the ‘old industrial core’ countries (for a recent successful example, see, for example, Williamson et al., 2013). It also raises the discussion of how and to what extent those companies increase competitive pressures, and one therefore needs to better understand the implications these pressures have on strategic development by competitors in Europe, Asia and in the rest of the world (for a recent publication, refer, for example, to Dolles, Alvstam and Strom, 2013).

Samsung Electronics: From ‘National Champion’ to ‘Global Leader’

Samsung Electronics, headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, is the flagship company of the largest and oldest of the Korean chaebol, the Samsung Group. It is one of the world’s leading conglomerates, with revenues in 2012 of US

Spaces of International Economy and Management: Launching New Perspectives on Management and Geography

248 billion and 369,000 employees (Samsung Electronics, 2012a). Samsung Electronics alone is ranked 20th in the Fortune Global 500 list, with revenues of US

From the American manufacturing belt to spatial clustering in transnational networks: the evolution of industrial geography as reflected in Geografiska Annaler

184 billion and 222,000 employees (Fortune, 2013). The group started with the founding of Samsung Corporation, a trading company, established by Lee Byung-Chull in 1938, selling fish, vegetables and fruit to China. Within a decade Samsung had flour mills and confectionery machines. The trading function continued to be important, but from what was, according to Chang (2008), a humble beginning, soon embarked on a strategy of rapid diversification into sugar, textiles, various financial services, petrochemicals, shipbuilding, heavy machinery equipment and aerospace. By 1950 Samsung had become one of Korea’s top ten firms.

On the economic interdependence between China and Japan: Challenges and possibilities

Brands and branding are geographical because they are situated in and/or associated with spaces and places; brands and branding travel and are experienced differently across time and space; richer people in prosperous places have different roles than relatively poorer people in less prosperous places in the relation to the spatial circuits of value and meaning in the production, circulation, consumption and regulation of brands and branding. (p. 7)

Embedded Internationalization: How Small- and Medium-Sized Swedish Companies Use Business-Network Relations with Western Customers to Establish Own Manufacturing in China

ABSTRACT This article features the Swedish geographer Sten De Geer’s contribution to the concept and delimitation of the American manufacturing belt, as published in Geografiska Annaler in 1927, and the reception of his article among US geographers. The marked attention paid to this article contributed to the positioning of Geografiska Annaler as one of the leading European journals of geography in the North American academic debate. Later articles published in Geografiska Annaler during the ensuing nine decades illustrate how the field of industrial geography developed in Sweden and internationally. It is demonstrated that today’s economic geographers have made deliberate attempts to more closely cooperate across disciplinary boundaries, particularly towards the field of international business, in order to better understand and explain the spatial concentration and distribution of economic activities in the same spirit as Sten De Geer’s seminal work.