Global production networks: theorizing economic development in an interconnected world

Abstract

Production in the global economy has undergone a qualitative shift towards a spatially more dispersed and organizationally more fragmented form. Contemporary production of goods and services in many sectors can best be envisioned as networks, which consist of multiple economic actors interconnecting multiple locations in a highly complex fashion. The rise of global production networks (GPNs) is ‘perhaps the predominant organisational feature of the world economic system’ (p. 3), argue Neil Coe and Henry Wai-Chung Yeung, both directors at the recently launched Global Production Networks Centre at the National University of Singapore. Accompanying the intensification of economic globalization has been a collaborative effort to theorize GPNs as a framework for analysing global production and its local developmental impacts in regions. Applied to a large number of cases, the concept has been used in a variety of ways to generate meaningful insights into global industries and their territorial outcomes. Given the proliferation of academic articles on the subject, the book-length treatment of GPNs constitutes a very laudable effort to synthesize existing work and direct future research.

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