Giorgio Prodi

China's Impact on Intra-African Trade

The role of China as a trading partner of sub-Saharan Africa is assessed using data on bilateral trade from the International Monetary Fund (1999-2007) and a gravity model. Trade with China is found to affect the intra-African market in different ways at different levels of China-Africa exports. Interaction variables are used to disentangle two opposite patterns: sub-Saharan Africas exports to China have a negative effect on intra-African trade at higher levels of the trade between China and sub-Saharan Africa and a positive effect at lower levels. Oil-exporting countries, Chinas biggest African trading partners, tend to isolate themselves from the internal African market as their exports to China increase. Conversely, a rise in exports to China from non-oil-exporting countries increases intra-African trade, probably due to a wealth effect. Intra-African market performance is briefly analyzed as a robustness check on the data. The results are interesting, especially those concerning the differences in trade determinants between oil-exporting and non-oil-exporting sub-Saharan countries.

State restructuring and subnational innovation spaces across Chinese prefectures

This paper maps the emergence of ‘subnational innovation spaces’ in China as they result from the interaction between state restructuring and the diffusion of innovative activities. Several countervailing forces have played a part in outlining a number of supra-urban regions that diverge by their own capability to develop and govern innovation-related socio-economic processes. On the one hand, the downscaling of state power enables the local administrative units to plan place-based strategies to embed technological upgrading, such as driving indigenous innovative activities to cluster around industrial and technological parks. On the other hand, this clustering entails reconfiguring socio-spatial interactions, while experiencing new networked connections to be governed. Thus, technological upgrading and state restructuring are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Following this perspective, the authors have rearranged various data sets at the prefectural level and processed them to disentangle some of the main underlying processes: first, the distribution of innovation-related ‘infrastructures’ across cities; second, the evolution of innovative activities; third, the transition towards a firm-centred Science and Technology system. These factors have been then combined together with neighbourhood relations to outline different subnational innovation spaces. The result is a country-wide map describing how the geography of innovative activities in China exhibits features that are connected to the long-term processes of transition, industrialisation and state restructuring. This picture suggests that the catching up with ‘upgraded development’ in laggard regions could be further promoted identifying ‘up-scaled’ regional hubs to coordinate the development of wider areas.

Growth convergence and local steady states across Chinese prefectures

ABSTRACT This article investigates how economic growth paths diverge across Chinese prefectural cities. Based on the conditional convergence hypothesis, the analysis includes inward foreign direct investments and patent applications to the European Patent Office as additional proxies of steady-state income levels and allows the convergence parameter to vary across groups. The results show that within-convergence rates are different across groups, but growth drivers positively affect both intraregional and interregional catching up.

Informal Modes of Governance in Customer Producer Relations: The Electronic Industry in the Greater Pearl River Delta (China)

like spatial/temporal fix, spatial division of labour and the core–periphery model. These theories show that market forces can reinforce, rather than reduce, existing spatial inequalities (p. 80). Chapter 6 presents some alternative approaches related to the ‘new economic geography’ and the evolutionary–institutionalist perspective. Some of these perspectives are the stage cycles and wave theories of technical change, regional innovation systems, clusters, learning regions, networks and issues related to culture, ethnicity and gender. Chapter 7 analyses different dimensions of the contemporary world, using the concepts and theories of the previous chapters. It examines the way in which economic globalization is affecting different people and places, addressing issues about governance, transnational corporations, global commodity chains, global finances, knowledge economies, emerging economies and the labour market. Finally, Chapter 8 addresses the main policy paradigms and how they deal with the spatially uneven spread of the globalization process. It provides a brief introduction to the neoliberal, Keynesian, state-socialist, ‘Third Way’ and alternative economic approaches, highlighting the economic geography dimensions that are relevant from each of these perspectives. In the light of the current global economic crisis, it finishes by providing a discussion about how these paradigms should be revised by economic geographers, moving to a ‘newest’ form of economic geography. Overall, the author accomplishes his defence of the role that the economic geography can and should play in the analysis of the impacts of the economic globalization, and he successfully provides the basic tools to carry on this task. Nevertheless, there are some issues that are still underdeveloped in this work. The first concern is the absence of any mention regarding extractive industries. Historically, the development of this industry was closely related to the first expansions of global industry. Currently, many underdeveloped regions are highly dependent on this activity and are strongly experiencing the consequences of the recent process of economic globalization, mainly because of the huge bargaining power of the extractive transnational corporations and the lax legislation favoured by neo-liberal policies, and it would have been interesting to have seen how the author might have interpreted literature on, for example, the bargaining model, the enclave and global production networks in light of this. The second issue is the proposal of a ‘newer’ economic geography. The author claims that this new theory should consider a wide range of socio-economic and cultural aspects that ‘would better reflect economies geographies of the finance-led capitalism of the “Great Recession” era’ (p. 157). However, most of these issues are analysed in the social sciences separately. Therefore, I would argue that instead of ‘re-discovering the wheel’, useful developments in economic geography could come from the adaptation of some of these existing theories and qualitative and quantitative tools. I would emphasize that, despite the author’s scepticism, quantitative economic tools can help to find patterns and make predictions that could be useful to understanding the spatial effects of the globalization process, when used under realistic assumptions. In sum, this book is a fine contribution to the literature about the impacts of the economic globalization process, especially as a short introduction to newcomers in these issues. Its coverage is very wide, smart and provoking, and it highlights the need of new policy frameworks that would contribute to a more sustainable development.