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China's defense industry is analyzed by comparing the technical level of the military and civilian products manufactured by China's nuclear, space, aviation, shipbuilding, ordnance, and electronics industries with their advanced counterparts. Generally, China's defense industry is about 20 years behind the global leaders. Thus, it is inappropriate to declare China's emergence as the world’s second military power. However, if it continues on its current development trajectory, it will attain that status in the near future.

How did Japan rise to challenge the U.S. economic supremacy? We argue that the foundation of Japan's rise from a defeated nation in 1945 to an economic powerhouse is the raw materials that Japanese firms have turned into cars, ships, consumer electronics, and of other industrial products. A small island nation that lacked adequate domestic supplies of virtually all the raw materials essential to industrial production became a world leader in the production of steel and of products which required millions of tons per year of raw materials. Japanese firms and the Japanese state turned an apparent material and economic disadvantage, the need to import large volumes of raw materials, into a competitive advantage over the U.S., Europe, and the rest of the world economy by driving down the cost of importing raw materials over long distances. We argue that the strategies of Japanese firms and the Japanese state to resolve the problems of procuring bulk cheaply and reliably from multiple distant locales drove the technical and organizational innovations that underlay Japan's rapid industrial development and restructured the world economy in support of Japan's development. Contrary to claims that globalization supercedes the national state, we find that the actions of the Japanese state, in coordination with firms and industry sectors, were crucial in developing and applying these strategies. The linchpin of these strategies were the MIDAs (Maritime Industrial Development Areas) built on land reclaimed by the Japanese state. This economic success in Japan was also critically dependent on the extraction of billions of dollars of wealth from its raw materials peripheries, most notably Australia, Brazil, and Canada.

This paper presents the second-generation estimates for the Italian engineering industry in 1911, a year documented both by the customary demographic census, and the first industrial census. The first part of this paper uses the census data to estimate the industry’s value added, sector by sector; the second further disaggregates each sector by activity, and estimates the value added, employment, physical product, and metal consumption of each one. A third, concluding section dwells on the dependence of cross-section estimates on time-series evidence. Three appendices detail the specific algorithms that generate the present estimates; a fourth, a useful sample of firm-specific data.

The “Blue Economy” is a recent topic of study that spans those economic activities which depend on ecosystem services, thereby including such sectors as tourism, maritime transport, energy, water, fishing, among others. However, there is only limited research approaching the added value produced by marine activities connected with these sectors. This research contributes to the literature by providing interpretations of blue economy factors in terms of their added economic value. The authors deployed secondary data from 2009 to 2020 from the European Union Economy Database to analyze six sectors involving maritime activities: coastal tourism, living marine resources, non-living marine resources, port activities, shipbuilding and repair, and maritime transport. This study highlights how the sustainability of countries depends on the ability to manage their natural resources, especially maritime resources. Furthermore, sustainability depends on the economic interpretation of countries and sectors over time with regard to creating value and managing the activities derived from ecosystem services.

Global businesses base their sourcing operations and manufacturing decisions primarily on financial principles and metrics. What is often disregarded is the strategic value of domestic locations and contextual tacit knowledge. However, recent empirical work on knowledge flows shows that proximity is crucial. The risk of losing knowledge and important competencies developed through generations within companies and value chains needs to be considered when developing a global sourcing strategy. This chapter sheds light on how global shift-backs, through backshoring are seen to affect organizations that are located in a high-cost country. Based on interviews with managers and key personnel within a specific industry, we explore how companies preserve innovative capabilities when considering closing down (captive) offshore centers or when embarking on a backshoring strategy. The implications derived from the case offers valuable insights into how organizational capabilities could be restored when companies bring manufacturing back.

Based on in-depth case studies from a high-cost environment, we identify context-specific aspects as important motivating factors for decision-makers re-evaluating the previous offshoring decisions. This chapter sheds light on the complexity of backshoring motives by adding a meso level, illustrating how case companies’ sourcing decisions evolve alongside the institutional context at a regional level. Further, the chapter provides a deeper understanding of the motives that underlay backshoring decisions and argues that these motivating factors differ from a broader set of drivers that can be found within the existing frameworks of backshoring.

The aim of the chapter is to identify the internationalization models of SME industrial district firms within a very integrated and dynamic Regional Innovation System (RIS) of Italy. By doing so, we investigate which are the strategies of firms embedded in a RIS to access global suppliers and markets. Accordingly, this chapter explores the role of SMEs firms' dynamic capabilities, its linkage with the industry investments in ICT (information and communication technologies) and the impact of the utilization of regional knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) in shaping the degree of internationalization of local firms.

The analysis is based on a survey addressed during 2004 to entrepreneurs or managers of a sample of 125 SMEs firms operating in 7 industrial districts (biomedical, ceramics, shipbuilding, footwear, textile, plastics and packaging) of the Emilia Romagna.

The results coming from a structural equation model revealed factors that impact on firms' degree of internationalization in the input (relocalization of foreign purchases through global value chains) and in the output dimension (export sales). Some interesting insights on what lies beneath the internationalization of firms in a very dynamic regional innovation system like that one of Emilia Romagna are provided.

The North East of England has entered the global bazaar in which its landscape, once pock marked by the scars of industries like coalmining, shipbuilding and steelmaking, has been cleaned up, beautified, and it has now entered the global competition between post-industrial places for inward investment and the spoils of the ever-expanding UK tourism industry. With this, the North East’s visitor economy now generates around £3.6 billion of expenditure each year, supporting some 54,600 jobs in 2018. The visitor economy is not only important as a stand-alone sector in the North East, but is integral to the whole North East economy, and needs to be a major driver of social change and diversification within it. As the Newcastle Gateshead Initiative says: the twenty first century North East is a place of vibrancy, with a quality of life that makes it a great place to visit, live and work, study and invest – which is a strapline narrative that clearly signals how tourism is indeed both an essential and integrated part of North East life. Brexit may provide the North East tourism industry with a stronger global stage.

This chapter charts the logic of that development and asks: is it a good thing, who benefits and who loses from the sectors development. It asks whose North East are we talking about as we prepare to enter what is anticipated to be a difficult and an uncertain third decade of the twenty-first century?