Documents industrial economics 51 results

"Since the early 2000s, scholars from a variety of disciplines have used the concept of financialization to describe a host of structural changes in the advanced political economies. Studies of financialization interrogate how an increasingly autonomous realm of global finance has altered the underlying logics of the industrial economy and the inner workings of democratic society. This paper evaluates the insights of more than a decade of scholarship on financialization. Three approaches will be discussed: the emergence of a new regime of accumulation, the ascendency of the shareholder value orientation and the financialization of everyday life. It is argued that a deeper understanding of financialization will lead to a better understanding of organized interests, the politics of the welfare state, and processes of institutional change."

"Much of contemporary comparative political–economic thinking about global industrial production accepts the following claims (a) that manufacturing is destined to leave rich political economies for lower wage ones; (b) that global industrial production is hierarchically structured with higher value operations concentrated in the rich countries and intermediate component production distributed across increasingly specialized clusters in emerging political economies; (c) that digital technological advance, automation and massive platform firms are ushering in a new historical regime of capitalism that is generating high rates of inequality and threatens to thoroughly degrade work for less educated and less skilled workers all over the globe. This article argues that these three arguments are deeply flawed because they present only a partial picture of contemporary global industrial dynamics. They exclude from view many concurrent developments that suggest that alternative political and economic practices and trajectories are possible. And they downplay the role that politics and struggle have played and can play in the constitution of the political economy. By deconstructing these three arguments, this article attempts to recover possibility from the constraints of false necessity in thinking about global industrial production dynamics."

"Decisions made by the food, tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical, gun, and automobile industries have a greater impact on today's health than the decisions of scientists and policymakers. As the collective influence of corporations has grown, governments around the world have stepped back from their responsibility to protect public health by privatizing key services, weakening regulations, and cutting funding for consumer and environmental protection. Today's corporations are increasingly free to make decisions that benefit their bottom line at the expense of public health. Lethal but Legal examines how corporations have impacted -- and plagued -- public health over the last century, first in industrialized countries and now in developing regions. It is both a current history of corporations' antagonism towards health and an analysis of the emerging movements that are challenging these industries' dangerous practices. The reforms outlined here aim to strike a healthier balance between large companies' right to make a profit and governments' responsibility to protect their populations. While other books have addressed parts of this story, Lethal but Legal is the first to connect the dots between unhealthy products, business-dominated politics, and the growing burdens of disease and health care costs. By identifying the common causes of all these problems, then situating them in the context of other health challenges that societies have overcome in the past, this book provides readers with the insights they need to take practical and effective action to restore consumers' right to health."

"We analyse industry–academic links in the context of a dual economy (or disarticulated industrial structure) in Ireland, as an example of a peripheral territory in the EU. The duality found in the Irish industrial structure is the result of a FDI-led industrialisation strategy which has resulted in two distinct economic sectors – foreign and indigenous, respectively – with weak interactions between the two. Through increased public funding of academic research, the Irish government aimed to attract and embed new waves of higher-value foreign direct investment and increase the dynamism of its indigenous enterprise base. Based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, the paper analyses a crucial aspect of Ireland's recent emphasis on STI policy – industry-academic linkages – and finds that the measures introduced reproduce in the public research system the uneven development found in Ireland's productive system between indigenous industry and the foreign-owned industrial base."

"The news that companies in OECD economies are increasingly bringing manufacturing activities back home has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Headline cases of a number of large multinational companies have given increased visibility to the phenomenon of reshoring in the economic press, academic research and policy discussions.. The debate on re-shoring (often also called "backshoring", "nearshoring", "onshoring") is very lively with some even arguing that the time of offshoring has come to an end. But considerable disagreement exists about how important this trend actually is for economies in particular the number of jobs that reshoring is supposed to bring back. While policy makers in OECD economies hope that reshoring might help to revitalise their slumping manufacturing industries, the rationale for policy measures around reshoring is not clear-cut."