4. North American Perspectives on Globalized Trade and Logistics

Recent contributions by Dicken et al. (2001) and Coe et al. (2004) have raised the issue of emerging global production networks (GPN) that have been established as a consequence of innovations in information and communications technology and of the increasing degree of global economic and social integration coined as globalization. GPN emerged to cover major parts of the globe, very dynamically in countries recently integrated to the new geography of global production. This is particularly the case for the Far East where initial settings occurred in Korea and Taiwan, but have expanded to locations such as China, India and Indonesia. In the western hemisphere, the U.S.-Mexican border region or parts of the European periphery (for example, Ireland, Scotland) and more recently in the middle-east of Europe have also seen developments. As Dicken (2003) pointed out in his seminal ‘Global Shift’, the establishment of GPN no longer occurs only in traditional, natural resource based and labor intensive branches such as the apparel industry but also in highly competitive, modern industries including electronics and computers (including components), machinery and automotive.