This volume explores how industries organize their global operations, through case studies of seven manufacturing industries. The chapters provide a nuanced understanding of the complex matrix of factor costs, access to inimitable capabilities, and time-based pressures that influence where firms decide to locate particular segments of the value chain.

What are the forces that are driving firms and industries to globalize their operations? This volume explores how specific industries have organized their global operations through case studies of seven manufacturing industries: garments and textiles, automobiles and auto parts, televisions, hard disk drives, flat panel displays, semiconductors, and personal computers. Based on long-term research sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, the chapters provide readers with a nuanced understanding of the complex matrix of factor costs, access to inimitable capabilities, and time-based pressures that influence where firms decide to locate particular segments of the value chain. The book examines globalization within the context of five factors affecting locational decisions: advances in transportation and communication; the clustering of knowledge assets; the drive to reduce cycle times; the commodification of existing products; and the relative advantages of proximity to customers. The case studies are framed by Paul Deguid's Preface on the significance of power in value chains and Bruce Kogut's conclusion on the importance of knowledge in locational decisions. Together, the chapters reveal a remarkable diversity of responses across industries to these forces, and suggest that any understanding of globalization must appreciate this diversity. This volume is ideal for both MBA and undergraduate students studying the location of economic activities by multinational firms.

For over sixty years the United States has been the largest economy and most powerful country in the world. However, there is growing speculation that this era of hegemony is under threat as it faces huge trade deficits, a weaker currency, and stretched military resources. America's Global Advantage argues that, despite these difficulties, the US will maintain its privileged position. In this original and important contribution to a central subject in International Relations, Carla Norrlof challenges the prevailing wisdom that other states benefit more from US hegemony than the United States itself. By analysing America's structural advantages in trade, money, and security, and the ways in which these advantages reinforce one another, Norrlof shows how and why America benefits from being the dominant power in the world. Contrary to predictions of American decline, she argues that American hegemony will endure for the foreseeable future.

This important book delivers a critical wake-up call: a fierce global race for innovation advantage is under way, and while other nations are making support for technology and innovation a central tenet of their economic strategies and policies, America lacks a robust innovation policy. What does this portend? Robert Atkinson and Stephen Ezell, widely respected economic thinkers, report on profound new forces that are shaping the global economy—forces that favor nations with innovation-based economies and innovation policies. Unless the United States enacts public policies to reflect this reality, Americans face the relatively lower standards of living associated with a noncompetitive national economy.The authors explore how a weak innovation economy not only contributed to the Great Recession but is delaying America's recovery from it and how innovation in the United States compares with that in other developed and developing nations. Atkinson and Ezell then lay out a detailed, pragmatic road map for America to regain its global innovation advantage by 2020, as well as maximize the global supply of innovation and promote sustainable globalization.

This volume of Progress in International Business Research includes a selection of 13 papers from the 35th European International Business Academy Annual Conference, which was held in Valencia (Spain) from the 13th to the 15th of December 2009.

Accelerating processes of economic globalization have fundamentally reshaped the organization of the global economy towards much greater integration and functional interdependence through cross-border economic activity. In this interconnected world system, a new form of economic organization has emerged: Global Production Networks (GPNs). This brings together a wide array of economic actors, most notably capitalist firms, state institutions, labour unions, consumers and non-government organizations, in the transnational production of economic value. National and sub-national economic development in this highly interdependent global economy can no longer be conceived of, and understood within, the distinct territorial boundaries of individual countries and regions. Instead, global production networks are organizational platforms through which actors in these different national or regional economies compete and cooperate for a larger share of the creation, transformation, and capture of value through transnational economic activity. They are also vehicles for transferring the value captured between different places. This book ultimately aims to develop a theory of global production networks that explains economic development in the interconnected global economy. While primarily theoretical in nature, it is well grounded in cutting-edge empirical work in the parallel and highly impactful strands of social science literature on the changing organization of the global economy relating to global commodity chains (GCC), global value chains (GVC), and global production networks (GPN).

Garofoli and Scott have gathered together a series of outstanding essays by academics and policy experts from around the world to show how the theory of local economic development (as formulated in more economically advanced countries) has major significance for countries in the world periphery.These essays present a general conceptual discussion o

Tentative contents include: •Offshoring: Threats and Opportunities Daniel Trefler (University of Toronto) •Modeling the Offshoring of White-Collar Services: From Comparative Advantage to the New Theories of Trade and FDI James Markusen (University of Colorado) •Globalization and the Outsourcing of Services: The Impact of Indian Offshoring Rafiq Dossani (Stanford University) •Offshoring in the Semiconductor Industry: A Historical Perspective Clair Brown and Greg Linden (University of California, Berkeley) •A Fairer Deal For America's Workers in a New Era of Offshoring Lael Brainard and Robert Litan (Brookings Institution and the Kauffman Foundation)

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A crucial question in contemporary economics concerns where economic activities will locate and relocate themselves in the future. This comprehensive, innovative book applies an evolutionary framework to spatial economics, arguing against the prevailing neoclassical equilibrium model, providing important concrete and theoretical insights, and illuminating areas of future enquiry.