Search results

This paper explores the regionalisation of the European Union’s supply chains and the impact of enlargement by looking at trends in trade in intermediate products between 1995‐2007. The findings show that enlargement has not significantly impacted overall levels of regionalization although it has led to quite major changes in the division of labor within the EU. In addition, the impacts have been very varied depending on the sector involved. There has been a greater consolidation of the EU supply chain in medium‐tech and up‐market goods while in low‐market and high‐tech goods, market share has been ceded to non‐EU sources.

This paper aims to exploit a new trade database to explore the extent to which trade, and the industrial division of labor which it represents, is regional in nature.

The analysis focuses especially on intermediates trade, in three key regions – the EU, NAFTA and ASEAN+3 – which together represent 78 percent of global trade.

The results indicate that levels of regional integration in trade and changes in that integration vary by region and by direction of flow. Notably, the EU has higher levels of intra‐regional trade than the other two. These results vary by technology, with high‐tech trade less regionally biased than others.

Trade data has been little used in the debate on the regionalization of business activity. In addition, the paper highlights trends, not just in total trade, but within intermediate products and by technology.

The fact that many international companies remain strongly orientated towards their home region has been highlighted in the work of several international business scholars. This work has given rise to the concept of “the liability of inter‐regional foreignness”. This paper aims to argue that the data that have so far been exploited in this debate are too aggregated and that more attention needs to be paid to differences between different types of companies if we are to better understand the reasons for this liability of inter‐regional foreignness and how companies can overcome it.

This paper uses trade data to explore levels of global and regional orientation in international exchanges of goods. It disaggregates the trade data by type of product (final goods or inputs to production), level of technology (high, medium and low tech) and direction of flow (imports and exports).

The paper finds striking differences between regions, types of products and trade direction. The trade data do not show an overwhelming home region bias in exchanges, but neither are these exchanges overwhelmingly global. Companies in different regions and different sectors seem to experience the liability of inter‐regional foreignness differently. In particular there is some evidence that high‐tech companies may be less subject to such difficulties. These findings imply that more attention needs to be paid to sectoral differences when analysing international business.

The trade data also suffer from some aggregation bias, as highlighted in the paper. In addition the inability to differentiate between inter‐ and intra‐firm trade limits the usefulness for theory building. However the results do provide some pointers for further research and imply that greater attention should be paid to the type of company and its position in the supply chain when considering the impact of the liability of inter‐regional foreignness.

The debate so far has been based on either Fortune 500 data or foreign direct investment data. Both of these datasets mix companies with very different market structures and operating practices. The originality of this work is to explore macro data extensively and look at exchanges differentiating by type of good. The results have implications for work on aggregated datasets. Simply differentiating by technology alone may lead to interesting variations in findings from firm‐level studies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of the international financial crisis on key clothing markets and their suppliers.

The analysis was undertaken on the basis of trade figures from the International Trade Centre (ITC) and Eurostat over the period 2005‐2009, and in particular over the period July 2007 to July 2009, when the strongest impacts from the crisis can be seen.

The different markets and suppliers have been impacted rather heterogeneously by the crisis. The key regional suppliers to the EU and the USA – Turkey and Mexico – have seen large falls in their clothing exports, as well as their textiles imports and exports. However, the EU has also seen major reductions in its trade. Others have been less strongly affected in the clothing sector. In textiles, trade fell in both directions everywhere, confirming a general tendency for intermediate product trade to be more affected by the crisis than final trade in goods. The research shows that certain sectors have been less strongly affected than others. However, the impacts have been heterogeneous across countries. The figures for the EU were extracted in euros, but also converted to dollars for comparison. The results vary quite considerably depending on the currency used for analysis.

The paper analyzes, for the first time, the most up to date trade data relating to flows over the period of the crisis. Through analysing the impacts of the economic downturn the potential impacts on the industrial landscape after the crisis can be better seen.