Michael Dunford

Industrial Districts, Magic Circles, and the Restructuring of the Italian Textiles and Clothing Chain

Abstract This article identifies the way in which a firm-centered, value-chain approach to studying the distinctive structure and evolution of the geography of the Italian textile and clothing industries (TCI) offers important insights that qualify the results of district-centered and commodity/value-chain research. Analyses of the functional profiles of textile and clothing companies and of the roles of design, distribution, and services help explain recent trends in industrial concentration and in the national and international fragmentation of value chains. These analyses also give rise to a view of districts as parts of an interdependent geographic division of labor that includes magic circles and delocalized zones of dependent manufacturing. An appreciation of these features of the system is vital for understanding recent trends in the performance of the TCI and the Made in Italy industries more generally.

Disparities in Employment, Productivity and Output in the EU: The Roles of Labour Market Governance and Welfare Regimes

DUNFORD M. (1996) Disparities in employment, productivity and output in the EU: the roles of labour market governance and welfare regimes, Reg. Studies 30, 339–357. The aim of this paper is to develop a set of empirical and theoretical connections between geographies of inequality on the one hand and geographies of productivity and of the mobilization of human potential on the other. To this end it presents a brief account of the current map of regional inequality in the EU. Disparities in Gross Domestic Product per head are shown to depend on two elements: differences in productivity and differences in the employment rate which, it is argued, reflects the capacity of an area to mobilize its human potential. An analysis of data for NUTS 1 regions in the EU and for neighbouring countries shows that the respective roles of productivity and employment rate differentials in explaining variations in output per head vary quite markedly from one region to another. To interpret these empirical results it is argue...

Inclusive globalization: unpacking China's Belt and Road Initiative

ABSTRACT China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a call for an open and inclusive (mutually beneficial) model of cooperative economic, political and cultural exchange (globalization) that draws on the deep-seated meanings of the ancient Silk Roads. While it reflects China’s rise as a global power, and its industrial redeployment, increased outward investment and need to diversify energy sources and routes, the BRI involves the establishment of a framework for open cooperation and new multilateral financial instruments designed to lay the infrastructural and industrial foundations to secure and solidify China’s relations with countries along the Silk Roads and to extend the march of modernization and poverty reduction to emerging countries.

Italian regional evolutions

The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of Italys territorial inequalities from 1952 to 1996 and to consider what the Italian record tells us about the utility of theories of convergence and divergence. After outlining the scale and nature of contemporary development gaps in Italy, the author explores the way these inequalities have changed, showing that convergence in the 1960s and early 1970s gave way to divergence, and identifying the respective roles of productivity, employment, and demographic growth in shaping the overall trend in inequality. To examine what underlay the aggregate trends attention is paid to the comparative evolution of twenty Italian regions, indicating clearly the changing relative fortunes of the metropolitan northwest, the Mezzogiorno, the Third Italy, and the Adriatic coastal regions. In the final sections several decompositions are employed to identify the contribution of productivity and employment growth across a range of sectors to the comparative performance of Italys regional economies.

Visualizing the intellectual structure and evolution of innovation systems research: a bibliometric analysis

Despite increasing awareness of the need to trace the trajectory of innovation system research, so far little attention has been given to quantitative depiction of the evolution of this fast-moving research field. This paper uses CiteSpace to demonstrate visually intellectual structures and developments. The study uses citation analysis to detect and visualize disciplinary distributions, keyword co-word networks and journal cocitation networks, highly cited references, as well as highly cited authors to identify intellectual turning points, pivotal points and emerging trends, in innovation systems system research from 1975 to 2012.

Geographical interdependence, international trade and economic dynamics: The Chinese and German solar energy industries:

The trajectories of the German and Chinese photovoltaic industries differ significantly yet are strongly interdependent. Germany has seen a rapid growth in market demand and a strong increase in production, especially in the less developed eastern half of the country. Chinese growth has been export driven. These contrasting trajectories reflect the roles of market creation, investment and credit and the drivers of innovation and competitiveness. Consequent differences in competiveness have generated major trade disputes.

Capital accumulation and regional development in France

Abstract The paper examines the interlinked development of social process and spatial form in the analysis of the changing patterns of production and employment in France. A major hypothesis is that specific phases of capital accumulation are associated with the use and production of specific forms of spatial diferentiation, and that recent changes in the location of employment in France are connected with the transition from one stage of capitalist development to another. Thus the changing spatial pattern of agricultural employment is seen as part of the decay of petty commodity production and the intergration of family farming into a new capitalist agriculture. Similarly, spatial change in manufacturing employment is also a component of industrial restructuring, and the associated development of new infrastrucural and labour requirements. The French state is one element of these processes and the article concludes with a case study of the relationships between capital accumulation and regional policy.

Old Europe, New Europe and the USA Comparative Economic Performance, Inequality and Market-Led Models of Development

The collapse of Communism in Europe and the recent enlargement of the European Union have significantly refashioned the world. As one of three developed economic blocs (Europe, North America and East Asia) Europe has increased in size and yet faces internal divisions between old and new Europe. While having shared interests, these blocs are also rivals, as is most strikingly reflected in the struggle for markets and over the expansion of imperial influence. At the same time globalization, economic transformation and integration have been profoundly shaped by Anglo-American/neo-liberal economic ideologies. The aim of this paper is to consider some of the implications of these developments for the new Europe extending from the Atlantic to Russia. Essentially it will deal with two issues. First, it will ask whether Europe has lost economic momentum relative to its trans-Atlantic rival, qualifying the earlier view that Rhine capitalism was superior to Anglo-American capitalism. Second, after considering the question of whether the European Union is a catch-up machine in a world in which inequalities are frequently widening, it will consider in some detail the territorial and social impacts of transition in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU). Throughout, attention will be paid to the impact of market-led models of development on growth and inequality, and the way in which a subjection of different parts of Europe to similar economic mechanisms, while in some senses making different parts of the continent more similar, also produces profoundly differentiated economic and social geographies.

Towards global convergence: Emerging economies, the rise of China and western sunset?

The financial crisis indicates the underlying bankruptcy of the last of a series of attempts to restore sustained growth in advanced countries since the end of the post-war Golden Age: Italian flexible specialization, Japanese and Rhine-style lean production, the new economy and Anglo-American financialization. Over the same period a number of emerging economies and in particular China have sustained high rates of growth. In the years to come, developed country growth is likely to remain slow because no alternative high-growth model is on the horizon. A country such as China conversely has the potential to continue to grow relatively fast provided it can profoundly alter its model of development in ways that address global and national imbalances. If it and other large emerging economies do achieve further sustained growth, this will in effect reverse the gap created by industrial revolution, colonialism and imperialism. The aim of this paper is to explain the reasons for and the possibilities of such global convergence, paying particular attention to the reasons for and implications of the financial crisis and the extent to which China’s fiscal stimulus contributes to a new model of Chinese development.

Geographies of Growth, Decline and Restructuring The Rise and Fall (Privatization) of the State-Owned Steel Sector and the Trajectories of Steel Localities in the Italian Mezzogiorno

This article deals with the recent evolution of the Italian steel industry and of steel-making activities in two localities in the Mezzogiorno. After providing an account of the rise and fall of the public steel sector in Italy and its role in shifting the industry’s centre of gravity to the South, it concentrates on a conceptually informed discussion of the remarkable rise of northern mini-mill operations and the subsequent acquisition by a few of these companies of the privatized public enterprises in the 1990s. Most attention is paid to two of the leading new companies (Lucchini and Riva) and to the trajectories of some of their steel-making activities in two localities in Basilicata and Apulia. The trajectories of these companies and localized steelmaking activities are themselves explained in the light of the resources and strategies of corporate actors and the context in which these actors operate. Actors’ strategies are driven by a quest for profits and a struggle to accumulate in the face of competition from rival producers, and are examined in relation to the economics of steel production in the Italian South, the processes of workforce recomposition in Taranto and the tensions between profitability and environmental protection. The context includes cyclical and secular trends in the consumption and production of steel, some of the aid and restructuring actions of the ECSC, some of the specific characteristics of accumulation and competition in the steel sector and the legacies of earlier phases of local development that helped shape actors’ strategies.