Author ORCID Identifier

Petr Pavlínek

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-28-2019

Publication Title

Journal of Economic Geography

First Page

1

Last Page

33

Abstract

This article draws on Harvey’s theory of uneven development and spatio-temporal fix to conceptualize the changing geography of the European automotive industry based on the spatial profit-seeking strategies of automotive firms. It employs the spatial concept of integrated peripheries, in order to explain the growth of the automotive industry in peripheral regions and its contemporaneous restructuring in existing locations. The empirical analysis is based on 2124 restructuring events of large automotive industry firms in the European Union countries and Norway between 2005 and 2016, and on 91 interviews with foreign automotive industry subsidiaries conducted in Czechia and Slovakia between 2009 and 2015. Large differences in labor costs and other production costs across the European Union explain the growth in the East European integrated periphery and simultaneous restructuring in both traditional core regions and old integrated peripheries in Western Europe. The empirical analysis also confirmed the increasing internationalization and the decreasing role played by large domestic firms in the European automotive industry.

Comments

© The Author(s) (2019). Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com


https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lby070

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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Funded by the University of Nebraska at Omaha Open Access Fund