Emerging Auto Industries in a World of Global Value Chains

This book provides a comprehensive overview of automotive industry development in emerging countries through the lens of global value chains. Over the past two decades, automobile production increasingly shifted to emerging economies, reconfiguring the global auto industry significantly. This volume traces this shift to illustrate industrial development dynamics, focusing on new players, their industrial strategies and on structural characteristics of these emerging markets. The volume’s first part is devoted to the theoretical analysis of industrial development issues affecting automotive industrialisation, including institutions, business strategies, technological change and labour regimes. The second part collects a range of country cases illustrating different automotive industrialisation trajectories. These include better-known countries as well as still underexplored cases across Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. This book will provide valuable reading to those researching globalisation and emerging countries, their comparative industrialisation, and the intersection of government policies and business strategy, specifically concerning the automotive industry. Lorenza Monaco (Phd SOAS, London) is a Researcher at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London, UK. She is also Senior Research Associate at SarchI Industrial Development, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and part of GERPISA. She works on the political economy of industrial development in the Global South, with a focus on the automotive industry. Martin Schröder is Associate Professor at the College of Policy Science, Ritsumeikan University, Japan, and Visiting Researcher at the Research Institute of Automobile and Parts Industries, Waseda University, Japan. His research interests are regional economic integration in ASEAN, the political economy of the automotive industry, and digitalisation in the automotive industry. "There are reasons — not all of them good — that the automotive industry lies at the center of industrial policies the world over, and has since the dawn of the industry. From Argentina to Vietnam, this volume collects the stories of countries as they strive to enter and upgrade their positions in the automotive GVC at a time of profound change. It makes for fascinating reading. The volume will surely serve as a benchmark for analysis of the global automotive industry." Timothy Sturgeon, MIT Industrial Performance Center "This book is an invaluable resource for all who are curious about the global automobile industry, especially the emerging actors from the developing world. Theoretical insights are accompanied by ten country case studies, which span from Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. These rich case studies offer deep empirical insights into how technological advancements, such as electrification and digitalization, are reshaping the structure and power dynamics within the global value chain. Readers are therefore equipped with a more nuanced understanding of the evolving forces transforming this industry. Lorenza Monaco and Martin Schröder, as editors, have brought together an exceptional team to craft this insightful and compelling work." Tham Siew Yean, Professor Emeritus at National University of Malaysia (UKM)