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 Professor John Bryson.
John Bryson is Professor of Enterprise and Economic Geography at the University of Birmingham. He is an internationally recognised scholar who has made significant contributions to understanding and explaining the complex ways in which economic activities are organized through space and in place. Recently, he has made major contributions to understanding the functional economic geographies of city regions by exploring the dynamics of economic activities located in large and small towns.
Repatriation or Reshoring of Manufacturing to the U.S. and UK:
Modular Theory-Building, Dynamics and Global Production Networks or From Here to There and Back Again
Vida Vanchan, Rachel Mulhall, and John R. Bryson
ABSTRACT
There are three contrasting approaches to understanding the geography of production. The first approach emphasizes the importance of local agglomerations, the second intrafirm mechanisms, whilst the third highlights global relationships or GPN or GVC. These explanations are partial, but complementary. This paper explores the restructuring of global production with a focus on the reshoring or repatriation of manufacturing production to the US and UK. Our intention is to identify the drivers behind reshoring as the first stage towards developing a dynamic conceptual framework for understanding the global organization of production. Reshoring needs to be conceptualized by drawing upon and combining approaches developed in GPN with micro-approaches to understanding firms including the development of a geography of production tasks. The study is based on a theoretical mapping to inform an empirical analysis of reshoring in both countries to identify and conceptualize the quantitative and qualitative causal drivers behind this process. The evidence suggests that reshoring is sector-dependent and is mainly driven by manufacturers’ cost-management and quality strategies combined with the importance of manufacturing products close to market. This involves a ‘total manufacturing cost analysis’ (TMC) in which access to a set of tangible and intangible inputs are key drivers behind dynamics of GPN.
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To view the published article, please click here.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this analysis post are those of the authors and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.
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