As part of a new blog series, we will be highlighting the excellent research produced by the City-REDI team since 2015, with the aim of creating an online searchable library. You can view this work by searching the blog with the relevant tag, either using the name of the author or the year of the publication. The series continues with Dr Amir Qamar.
Amir joined City-REDI as a Research Associate in October 2016, Amir has a background in Economics and International Business, but his more recent work has focused on Operations Management and Supply Chain Management as his PhD research investigated the performance and contextual trade-offs between lean and agile organisations within the automotive industry in the West Midlands.
Re-shoring within the UK Manufacturing Industry: An Inevitable Decline?
Chapter featured in A Qamar & E Gardner (eds), Dissident Voices in Europe? Past, Present and Future. Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2016)
Abstract:
Global manufacturing has received great attention during 2015, and even though UK manufacturing has often been ascribed with a negative stigma, one cannot dispute that with a workforce of approximately 2.6 million people, accounting for approximately half of the UK’s exports and ranked as the 11th largest manufacturing industry in the world (The Manufacturer, 2014), it plays a crucial role in the British economy. Since 2013 there has been an outburst in headlines concerning the concept of re-shoring. Traditionally, in order to save costs, developed economies shifted manufacturing operations to developing economies, however, due to the rise in labour costs, transportation costs, ease of market access and concerns over quality levels, there has been an increasing trend to bring manufacturing activities back home. Bringing manufacturing back from developing nations to developed nations, such as the UK, can be acknowledged as a dissident practice. The main aims of this chapter are to provide readers with a set of advantages associated with re-shoring and to evaluate the disadvantages of this phenomenon. Findings suggest that unless there are major reforms within governmental policies, factors such as an increasing shortage of skilled workers, high energy costs and the complexity of planning regulations ultimately outweigh the advantages of manufacturing in the UK, hence, it can be concluded that the practice of re-shoring to the UK may in fact inevitably decline.
You can view the chapter and purchase the book here.
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