Ian MacLachlan

Maquiladora Myths: Locational and Structural Change in Mexico's Export Manufacturing Industry

Trends in location, labor force, and procurement practices in maquiladoras are examined using recent data sources. A growing proportion of maquiladoras are selecting interior locations, south of the borderlands. Once dominated by young women, the labor force is rapidly approaching gender parity. While far below prevailing rates in the United States, maquiladora wages are comparable with equivalent manufacturing sectors in Mexico. Majority ownership of maquiladoras is split almost evenly between Mexico and the U.S., however, maquiladoras have failed to develop domestic sources of materials and parts and remain dependent on imported material inputs. As the North American Free Trade Agreement is phased in, the regulatory environment of maquiladoras will change but their role as low cost assembly specialists will persist.

Plant Closure and Market Dynamics: Competitive Strategy and Rationalization

This paper examines the role of market dynamics and competitive strategy in industrial plant closure using a case study of Sheller-Globe Corporations Canadian Steering Wheel Division. The dominant motive for plant closure is to reduce production capacity in markets that have surplus supply. The market dynamics that precede rationalization are often complex, however, and the adaptive and competitive strategies of plant-closing firms need to be examined in detail for the reasons for closure and the mechanisms behind regional job loss to be understood. Firms attempt to adapt to market decline, new entrants, and changes in buyer and supplier relations. When competitive strategies fail, plant closure is the ultimate means of withdrawal from an untenable market position.

A bloody offal nuisance: The persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth century London

British slaughter-house reformers campaigned to abolish private urban slaughter-houses and establish public abattoirs in the nineteenth century. Abolition of Londons private slaughter-houses was motivated by the congestion created by livestock in city streets, the nuisance of slaughter-house refuse in residential neighbourhoods and public health concerns about diseased meat in the food supply. The butchers successfully defended their private slaughter-houses, illustrating the persistence of the craftsmans workshop and the importance of laissez-faire sentiments in opposition to municipalization in Victorian London.

Kwinana Industrial Area: agglomeration economies and industrial symbiosis on Western Australia's Cockburn Sound

ABSTRACT The Kwinana Industrial Area is nearing its 60th anniversary as a resource-processing industrial cluster. Its longevity may be understood in the traditional terms of industrial inertia resulting from three types of agglomeration economies: localisation, transfer, and urbanisation economies. However, industrial ecology provides an alternative approach to describe the environmental impacts of interplant linkages: utility/infrastructure sharing, supply-chain synergies, by-product exchanges, and joint provision of services. The agglomeration economies and industrial symbiosis approaches to clustering are compared using interplant relationships drawn from the case of Kwinana.

Economic shock and regional resilience: Continuity and change in Canada's regional employment structure, 1987–2012

This article analyses regional resilience to economic shock in Canada from 1987 to 2012, a period that included severe recessions and major free-trade agreements. Employment is cross-tabulated by region, industry and gender and partitioned cumulatively using three-way multifactor partitioning for each period from 1987–1988 to 1987–2012. Employment loss in each recession is found to be more closely associated with industry-mix in the preceding growth period than with the region effect. At each recession, manufacturing had much bigger employment losses and a much weaker recovery than business services. Thus manufacturing amplifies economic shocks, while business services act as regional shock absorbers. Manufacturing employment decline in Ontario was influenced by trade liberalization and far exceeds what would be expected from the industry and region effects alone. Female employment growth outpaced male employment growth in every region and in every industry group apart from business and appeared to be more resilient to recession. But corrected for their industry composition and regional disparities, these gender differences are substantially reduced.

New town in the bush: Planning knowledge transfer and the design of kwinana, western australia

The City of Kwinana is a satellite community outside of Perth, Western Australia, that was planned in support of an oil refinery and industrial area in 1952. Kwinana is significant as one of the first planned new towns in Australia and a symbol of the urban industrial maturation of the state of Western Australia. This article summarizes the key events leading up to the selection of the site, the most salient features of the development agreement, and the planning and construction of the new town. Two ways of understanding planning knowledge transfer are discussed in a postcolonial context and applied to understand the overseas origins and vernacular features of this unique example of Australian planning.

Restoring the "Regional" to Regional Policy: A Regional Typology of Western Canada

Sur le plan des politiques publiques, la définition et l’analyse des régions économiques à l’intérieur des provinces est une question qui a été peu étudiée au Canada malgré l’importance et la persistance des disparités en matière de croissance régionale. Dans cet article, nous montrons que, entre 2001 et 2006, la croissance de l’emploi dans les 30 régions économiques de l’Ouest du Canada était associée aux caractéristiques de chacune des régions (situation et population) et à leurs diverses activités économiques, et à la typologie régionale que l’on peut en déduire. L’Ouest du Canada constitue une seule région de développement depuis 1988 – un quart de siècle –, et l’accent n’a été mis que sur la diversification de ses activités économiques. Toutefois, ses régions économiques montrent une grande diversité de structures économiques et de taux de croissance, et l’on y observe à la fois le taux de croissance de l’emploi le plus élevé et le plus faible au Canada. La diversité régionale entraîne des problèmes qui requièrent des politiques conçues selon les occasions et les besoins de développement de chaque région, et non l’approche unique adoptée par le ministère de la Diversification de l’économie de l’Ouest.

Cultivating a New Cattle Culture: Lifelong Learning and Pasture Land Management

‘Pasture land management’ implies the planned and sustainable use of a grasscovered landscape by humans to feed and accommodate livestock. Pasture land may be found in a true ‘grassland ecozone’ that characterises much of North America’s Great Plains or it may be tame pasture that has been carved out of Canada’s boreal forest. In the latter case, grass is not the natural climax vegetation but it grows well where the natural forest cover has been cleared by human hands. Thus pasture land (a term used interchangeably with ‘grazing land’) is a social construction, created both as a conceptual land use category and as an area of land that supports grazing activity. Grazing implies feeding domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep on standing grass although there is always some competition for the grass resource from ‘wild’ animals. Pasture land is an economic land use, driven by a profit motive to nourish animals and create value in human terms. Given the artifice and self-interest that is an integral part of the pasture land concept, it may seem paradoxical that sustainable pasture land management is concerned with restoring the biotic diversity and biomass productivity in a tangible and deliberate mimesis of the natural climax vegetation that once characterised the grassland and boreal forest ecozones. But we must also acknowledge that the notion of a pristine pre-industrial landscape is no less a social construction than large-scale factory farms, or for that matter, current models of sustainable agriculture. Pasture land is a constructed landscape that has been subjected to human interventions that range from aggressive clear-cutting and a total change in vegetative cover to the extensive use of rangeland in which it is animal activity, mediated through stocking density, that has had the greatest impact on the ecosystem. This chapter illustrates how views about pasture land management have developed in Canada. Farmers and ranchers are growing aware of the environmental