Abstract
As a new decade starts, it might be timely to pause and reflect on how past trends and events are deciding the present and will shape the future business environment and strategies. Since the watershed moment of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, the global economy has faced as many challenges as opportunities: a more critical attitude towards globalisation; a renewed focus on the sources of productivity; a stronger commitment to manufacturing and entrepreneurship; a greater priority on technological exploration and adoption; and a tentative move towards greening the economy and society. In this tumultuous environment, firms have had to find new partners, to reassess their market position, to revise their location strategies and to reorganize their Global Value Chains (GVCs)
Part of this GVCs reorganization towards shorter and closer value chains is referred to as 'manufacturing reshoring’ and it describes firms’ decision to swap oversees production for domestic production (either via domestic investment or by choosing domestic suppliers). The topic of “reshoring” has attracted the interest of many scholars from different disciplines such as Supply Chain Management, International Business (IB) and Economic Geography (EG). Drawing upon the open dialogue between scholar in the IB and EG, this paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach by leveraging the bottom-up logic intrinsic to the GVCs literatures. The bottom-up approach has been extensively applied to study territorial upgrading in least developed host economies, but only very recently, it has been used to understand firms’ location choices in advanced economies.
In this work, we focus on firms’ reshoring strategies at the sub-national level assuming that firms are place-aware when they consider location choices aligned with reshoring, to the extent that they weight Knowledge-, Industry 4.0-, and Suppliers Network seeking factors.
From the literature review, we aim to address two new research questions:
1. Which factors influence a manufacturing reshoring strategy at a sub-national (i.e. regional) level?
2. To what extent manufacturing reshoring strategies have brought value-added in the sub-national region?
To answer these research questions, a comparative cross-country analysis is carried out across three different regions: the Midlands (in the United Kingdom), Veneto (in Italy), and California (in the United States). Methodologically, we use primary data collected with a web-based survey between April 2018 and March 2019. We obtained 276 usable responses across the three regions. We adopt a Multinomial Logit Model (MLM) to examine the choice of manufacturing reshoring strategies such as (i) in-house reshoring, (ii) domestic reshoring, (iii) in-house & domestic reshoring, (iv) no reshoring across our three regions.
Our findings show the following: first, Industry 4.0 seeking factors influence the adoption of in-house & domestic reshoring, confirming that manufacturing reshoring brings value-added to the region; second, firms are shortening their VC to create more value-added in the domestic manufacturing activity. Finally, firms in the Midlands and California are found to be better positioned to adopt a reshoring strategy that leverages Industry 4.0 factors than firms in Veneto.
Part of this GVCs reorganization towards shorter and closer value chains is referred to as 'manufacturing reshoring’ and it describes firms’ decision to swap oversees production for domestic production (either via domestic investment or by choosing domestic suppliers). The topic of “reshoring” has attracted the interest of many scholars from different disciplines such as Supply Chain Management, International Business (IB) and Economic Geography (EG). Drawing upon the open dialogue between scholar in the IB and EG, this paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach by leveraging the bottom-up logic intrinsic to the GVCs literatures. The bottom-up approach has been extensively applied to study territorial upgrading in least developed host economies, but only very recently, it has been used to understand firms’ location choices in advanced economies.
In this work, we focus on firms’ reshoring strategies at the sub-national level assuming that firms are place-aware when they consider location choices aligned with reshoring, to the extent that they weight Knowledge-, Industry 4.0-, and Suppliers Network seeking factors.
From the literature review, we aim to address two new research questions:
1. Which factors influence a manufacturing reshoring strategy at a sub-national (i.e. regional) level?
2. To what extent manufacturing reshoring strategies have brought value-added in the sub-national region?
To answer these research questions, a comparative cross-country analysis is carried out across three different regions: the Midlands (in the United Kingdom), Veneto (in Italy), and California (in the United States). Methodologically, we use primary data collected with a web-based survey between April 2018 and March 2019. We obtained 276 usable responses across the three regions. We adopt a Multinomial Logit Model (MLM) to examine the choice of manufacturing reshoring strategies such as (i) in-house reshoring, (ii) domestic reshoring, (iii) in-house & domestic reshoring, (iv) no reshoring across our three regions.
Our findings show the following: first, Industry 4.0 seeking factors influence the adoption of in-house & domestic reshoring, confirming that manufacturing reshoring brings value-added to the region; second, firms are shortening their VC to create more value-added in the domestic manufacturing activity. Finally, firms in the Midlands and California are found to be better positioned to adopt a reshoring strategy that leverages Industry 4.0 factors than firms in Veneto.
| Original language | English |
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| Publication status | Published - 19 Jul 2020 |
| Event | 2020 – Virtual Conference - SASE: Development Today: Accumulation, Surveillance, Redistribution - Virtual Duration: 18 Jul 2020 → 21 Jul 2020 |
Conference
| Conference | 2020 – Virtual Conference - SASE |
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| Period | 18/07/20 → 21/07/20 |