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Reshoring, whether concerning back-reshoring or near-reshoring, is a quite recent phenomenon. Despite the economic and political interest of this topic, research questioning determinants and results of reshoring remain rare. The purpose of this paper is to help people to better understand reasons for reshoring.

To better understand reasons for near-reshoring, the authors conducted a study among 215 French firms in spring 2016, including 197 of them sourcing manufactured goods from China.

Near-reshoring is a recent but growing phenomenon: almost half of the companies sourcing in China chose over the past few years to near-reshore the supply of certain products initially purchased in China, and 10 per cent plan to do so soon. The authors determine main motives for near-reshoring and show that companies having reshored are very satisfied in terms of product quality, responsiveness between order and delivery, responsiveness between design and production, and in terms of total cost of ownership too.

Despite the economic and political interest of the topic of reshoring, research questioning determinants and results of reshoring remains rare.

The first aim of the chapter is to offer a characterization of back-reshoring as a possible step of the firm’s nonlinear internationalization process. The second aim is to review the empirical literature on back-reshoring and to complement it with the findings of an extensive data collection.

In this chapter we adopted an explorative approach building on both theoretical and empirical literature from the fields of international business and international operations Management. We also collected secondary data on back-reshoring decisions in order to define the magnitude of the investigated phenomenon and to offer a primary characterization.

Our findings confirm that, though it cannot be considered a generalized trend, back-reshoring is a very topical issue for international business scholars. It represents an autonomous phenomenon consistent with the idea of nonlinear internationalization process.

The chapter is based on cross-sectional data. Longitudinal research is required in order to address the proposed research questions and help understanding “how much” and what kind of manufacturing will be housed in western countries in the near future.

This is the first attempt to conceptualize back-reshoring as a possible step of the firms’ internationalization process. It is also the first chapter that summarizes and discusses the literature and empirical evidence on back-reshoring emerging from a wide range of countries.

Driven by the disruptive effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing debate about the international location of firms' manufacturing activities has increasingly highlighted the specific benefits and costs of near-shoring versus far-shoring. However, the effects of near-shoring versus far-shoring on customer perceived quality and purchase intention have not been examined. Thus, this study aims to develop a conceptual model and provide new evidence to fill this gap. In particular, the study explores the roles of brand familiarity and corporate social responsibility (CSR) to explain the different levels of perceived quality and purchase intention in relation to near-shoring versus far-shoring.

This study includes two analyses of data collected from a sample of Italian customers. The first analysis consists of a 2 (high/low brand familiarity) × 3 (domestic insourcing, near-shoring, far-shoring) factorial design, and data are assessed via analyses of variance (ANOVA). The second analysis evaluates the suggested model in the two scenarios (near-shoring and far-shoring) via partial least squares–structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) multigroup analysis.

Results showed that customer perceived quality and purchase intention were significantly higher for near-shoring than for far-shoring, but only when brand familiarity was low. No significant difference was found for participants with a high level of brand familiarity. In addition, the level of a brand's pre-offshoring perceived CSR was negatively related to perceived quality, and this was conceptually justified by the CSR-washing effect. Again, this effect was found only when brand familiarity was low.

The findings contribute to advancing the current understanding of the multiple effects of the offshoring decision and clarify that near-shoring and far-shoring have different effects for customers with low brand familiarity. The findings also emphasise that the far-shoring decision can elicit the perception of decoupling between the firm's CSR claims and CSR actions, thus decreasing perceived quality.

This study provides managers with additional inputs to make more informed decisions regarding offshoring. While the post-pandemic scenario seems to favour near-reshoring over far-shoring due to agility considerations, this study also provides additional evidence of the superiority of near-reshoring from the customer's perspective.

This is the first study to examine and prove the differential effects of near-shoring versus far-shoring on the customer's perceptions and behaviours.

Manufacturing offshoring has received substantial attention within international business studies that have explored where activities are located and how they are governed. However, recent examples of manufacturing relocation to the home country/region have put the advantages of offshoring under scrutiny, since the location of production activities in high-cost countries may have positive impacts in terms of innovation and marketing opportunities. Despite the growing interest in offshoring and “relocations of second degree,” there is a lack of knowledge on the alternative strategies firms may implement after offshoring. This chapter aims to propose a comprehensive framework to summarize and classify the multiple alternatives firms may implement after the initial relocation abroad of manufacturing activities. Based on an extensive literature review and a comparative analysis of Italian case studies, the chapter suggests theoretical advancement in the theory of location of business activities, offering multiple post-offshoring strategic options that may be implemented individually or in combination. In so doing, the analysis also stresses the variety of strategic paths and the complexity of choices concerning manufacturing location, emphasizing reshoring as a nuanced phenomenon and exploring how domestic and foreign locations can complement each other and be mutually reinforcing.

Within the theoretical framework of global value chains (GVCs), much importance has been given to industrial districts (IDs) and their role as localized manufacturing systems. The regionalization of GVC has opened new questions on the location of manufacturing activities and the potential consequences at the ID level. The reshoring phenomenon challenges internationalization processes, changing the configuration in trade dynamics for IDs. This paper aims to investigate which are the main internationalization patterns followed by district small and medium enterprises (SMEs) under the perspective of the regionalization of GVCs. This will help both practitioners and policymakers to better understand internationalization trajectories aimed at sustaining the economic development of district firms and territories.

The analysis has been conducted using a survey carried out on 210 ID SMEs in the furniture, mechanics and fashion industries located in Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia regions, in northeastern Italy. Moreover, data released from the Italian Customs Agency have been merged to detect the trends of interviewed firms’ internationalization between 2005 and 2019.

The results highlight how the geography of internationalization has changed over time, in particular following the regionalization of the GVCs. There are also differences among the industry specializations of IDs. This could be attributable to the strategy pursued by each firm to control the competition both in the domestic market and abroad, also in relation to GVC lead firms’ location strategies.

This paper applies new data on the analysis of ID SMEs related to international transactions over a long period of time. In doing this, this paper adds new insights to the GVC literature and future policies to be implemented to foster the participation of district firms in the global scenario.

Production activities affect environmental and social pillars of firm’s sustainability. Therefore, decisions regarding where products are manufactured have a tremendous impact on a firm’s sustainability. However, until now, interdependencies among back-shoring decisions and sustainability issues have been rarely addressed. This paper aims to fill this research gap and develop avenues for future research.

The paper adopts an explorative approach based on a two-steps desk research strategy. In the first one, a structured literature review is implemented analysing 105 Scopus documents published up to August 2018. In the second step, empirical evidence of manufacturing back-shoring decisions coming from secondary sources is analysed and discussed.

The investigated research questions shed new light on the “how” back-shoring decisions are taken and implemented. The structured review and the empirical evidence show that environmental and social sustainability issues are increasingly assuming certain relevance for the academic debate and managerial decisions.

The structured analysis of the selected literature and the empirical evidence sorted by the UnivAQ Manufacturing Reshoring Dataset clearly shows that neither scholars nor firms’ managers and entrepreneurs considered the environmental and social pillars of sustainability as the most relevant in terms of back-shoring drivers/motivation, outcome/benefit and/or barrier/enabler.

The paper suggests policymakers that sustainability-based legislations may influence – and support – the firm’s decision to backshore. At the same time, policymakers should carefully reflect on the role of market labour laws and ensure that relocations are not based on “informal subcontracting and informal employment”. At the same time, the paper suggest managers to adopt a “progressive” and/or a “selective” approach when implementing reshoring decisions based (also) on sustainability issues.

Even if other authors suggest that sustainability issues may be relevant for the reshoring decisions, this is the first attempt to define the base of knowledge on this topic and to suggest avenues for further research.

Supply chain (SC) configuration has gained increased acceptance as an important issue when evaluating new customization possibilities and this evidence has contributed to the strengthening of the debate between global vs local production locations. This work contributes in enrichment of this topic by studying how local or global SC location decisions influence performances by considering a SC point of view, in terms of cost and time, in traditional and customized productions.

A discrete event simulation approach, based on experimentation through executable configurations, was used to evaluate different SC scenarios for customized as well as traditional products within the footwear industry.

The results indicated that to identify proper SC locations, existing trade-offs between the time and cost performances should be studied, avoiding the evaluation of a single performance independently and, instead, adopting a complete SC point of view while considering these performances.

This evidence has contributed to the reinforcement of the discussion between far-shore destinations vs near-shore production locations. Further studies are encouraged to adopt the present model, in which addition of other variables such as specific manufacturing competences to differentiate suppliers, both local and global suppliers, or the possibility of realizing special types of product customization required by final consumers can be done.

The paper contributes to the academic and practitioners' debate by proposing a systemic approach to assess SCs’ performances in customized contexts and to compare them to traditional collections. Results indicate that cost and time performance must find a balance that does not necessarily correspond to an exclusively local or global production.

This work contributes to the SC configuration issue by considering the trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness (i.e. SC costs and SC times) for customized productions by reviving and enriching it with an SC perspective in customization contexts.

The aim of this paper is to analyze and classify research that has been conducted on manufacturing reshoring, i.e. the decision to bring back to the home country production activities earlier offshored, independently of the governance mode (insourcing vs outsourcing). Consequently, the paper also aims at providing avenues for future research and to highlight the distinct value of studying manufacturing reshoring either per se or in combination with other constructs of the international business tradition.

A set of 57 carefully selected articles on manufacturing reshoring published in international journals or books indexed on Scopus in the past 10 years was systematically analyzed based on the “5Ws and 1H” (who-what-where-when-why and how) set of questions.

The authors’ work shows a certain convergence among authors regarding what reshoring is and what its key features and motivations are. In contrast, other related aspects, such as the decision-making and implementation processes, are comparatively less understood.

As manufacturing reshoring is a “recent” topic, for some of its aspects, only exploratory research is available to date, limiting the authors’ possibility to either characterize it in a more exhaustive way or highlight well-established patterns.

The paper demonstrates that studying reshoring will indeed contribute to expanding our understanding of internationalization processes and strategies in general and of production internationalization specifically. While past studies have argued that the learning derived from international experience would permit firms to overcome their unfamiliarity with new business environments, reshoring might show that this outcome is not necessarily certain. Rather, firms might not be able to overcome obstacles because of internationalization or they might realize that attempting to do so is not desirable, e.g. because of excessive risk or changes in the firm’s strategic priorities.

From a societal point of view, the present research underlines that reshoring can be part of that re-industrialization policy that many Western countries include in their economic agenda – yet, its impact on employment should not be overestimated, as often relocation is only in regard to some product lines. At the same time, there might be an intimate relationship between reshoring and the various forms of technological innovations applied to manufacturing – which has become popularly labeled as “Industry 4.0”.

Literature reviews proposed until now usually paid almost exclusive attention to motivations driving this phenomenon. This paper offers a broader and more comprehensive examination of the extant knowledge of manufacturing reshoring and identifies the main unresolved issues and knowledge gaps, which future research should investigate.

This study aims to investigate the manufacturing reshoring decision-making content from an Eclectic Paradigm perspective.

Data were collected through a six-step systematic literature review on factors influencing manufacturing reshoring decision-making. The review is based on 100 peer-reviewed journal papers discussing reshoring decision-making contents published from 2009 to 2022.

In total, 80 decision factors were extracted and then categorized into resource-seeking (8%), market-seeking (11%), efficiency-seeking (41%) and strategic asset-seeking (16%) advantages. Additionally, 24% of these were identified as hybrid, which means that they were classified into multiple categories. Some decision factors were further identified as reshoring influencing factors (i.e. drivers, enablers and barriers).

Scholars need to consider what other theories can be used or developed to identify and evaluate the decision factors (determinants) of manufacturing reshoring as well as how currently adopted theory can be further advanced to create clearer and comprehensive theoretical frameworks.

This research underscores the importance of developing clearer and more comprehensive theoretical frameworks. For practitioners, understanding the multifaceted nature of decision factors could enhance strategic decision-making regarding reshoring initiatives.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the value and practicality of the Eclectic Paradigm in categorizing factors in manufacturing reshoring decision-making content and presents in-depth theoretical classifications. In addition, it bridges the gap between decision factors and influencing factors in the decision-making content research realm.

Antibiotics shortages have become an increasingly common problem in Europe because of several reasons, including the offshoring of the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients for many of these products to low production cost countries, such as China and India. The problem has deteriorated because of the Covid-19 crisis that has put most global value chains (GVCs) under great stress. This situation has boosted extensive discussions among academics, practitioners and policymakers on possible changes to the configuration of GVCs. This paper aims to focus specifically on antibiotics supply chains from the perspective of a small country (Sweden), and analyse the pros and cons of backshoring and nearshoring alternatives, as a means to reduce drug shortages.

This work adopts a systemic perspective to capture the implications of reshoring for the different stakeholders involved in the antibiotics field. The present meso-analysis, focusing at the industry level, is based on multiple sources of primary data collected between 2014 and 2021, including participation in policy-related projects and interviews with over 100 representatives of key stakeholders in the antibiotics field.

This paper shows how reshoring can address the problems of drug shortages and reduce availability risk in antibiotics’ GVCs. However, the authors show that no simple and best solution exists because both alternatives of reshoring, i.e. backshoring and nearshoring, entail pros and cons for different stakeholders. The authors conclude with implications for policymakers and managers.

The analysis of pros and cons of both backshoring and nearshoring for various stakeholders offers relevant implications for research on operations and supply management, international business and economics/political science.

This paper looks at reshoring as a policy-driven decision and provides an innovative systemic perspective to analyse the implications for different stakeholders of two reshoring options concerning the antibiotics supply chain.