Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The expectation that Chinese apparel and textile exports will swamp the US and EU retail markets now that international quotas on those products have been eliminated has fueled much of the discussion of the future of these industries. Although imports from China have surged since the elimination of quotas on 1 January 2005, this conventional wisdom masks important choices that remain for public and private policies over time. In particular, two factors will continue to have major effects on the location of apparel and textile production going forward. First, public-policy choices will continue to influence sourcing location; in particular, as they relate to tariffs and regional trade polices as well as to policies affecting the linkages between countries. Second, the lean-retailing model that now prevails requires apparel suppliers to replenish basic and fashion basic products on a weekly basis. As that retailing model became dominant in the 1990s, so too did the advantage of sourcing these apparel items closer to the US market so that products could be manufactured and delivered more rapidly from a smaller finished-goods inventory. Even though costs remain a driving factor, we show that proximity advantages for certain classes of products will continue in a postquota world as retailers raise the bar ever higher on the responsiveness and flexibility required of their suppliers.

While apparel manufacturing is often considered the quintessential global industry, the regional dimension of trade and production in the textile and clothing sector is less widely noted. In this paper I discuss two macroregional production blocs: North America (defined as the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean Basin countries) and Greater Europe [which includes the European Union (EU), Central and Eastern Europe, Turkey, and North Africa]. Analyzing what opportunities regionalization might provide is particularly relevant given China's increasing dominance of both the EU and US import markets in the post-Multifibre Arrangement period. Drawing on the global commodity chains literature, I discuss three dimensions around which cross-regional comparative research on the European and North American apparel sectors can be organized: (1) production model; (2) institutional context; and (3) development outcomes. Several similarities between these production blocs are noted, particularly with regard to the intraregional division of labor expressed by networks connecting firms in higher-wage and lower-wage countries and the coexistence of assembly subcontracting and full-package manufacturing in both regions, but differences include the existence in Europe of a stronger textile base and a more expansive regionalization strategy (as suggested by the Euro–Mediterranean Partnership), which may strengthen the competitiveness of the Greater European bloc vis-à-vis its North American counterpart.

In this paper we examine trajectories of change in London's garment industry set within the contexts of deindustrialisation, increasing competitive pressures, and discursive shifts in public policy towards the ‘creative industries’. We emphasise the diversity of firm-level strategies that have been implemented to cope with increasing competitive pressures, liberalisation, and outsourcing in the industry. We identify a dominant trajectory of factory closure, job loss, and deindustrialisation as firms are unable to compete on the basis of the kinds of contracting requirements of buyers and retailers in a high-cost location such as London. We also identify a range of strategies that firms continuing to operate in London have adopted, including the development of new functions in the supply chain, repositioning in relation to specific market niches, coordinating the relocation of production offshore, upgrading towards more design-intensive, small-batch production, and spreading risk across a range of activities. While some of these strategies connect to wider public policy discourses concerning the creative industries in London, they also suggest the need for a broader framing of firm-level trajectories set within the context of the power of major buyers and retailers. Consequently, in the paper we raise concerns over the extent to which creative industries can contribute to enhancing social inclusion and economic development.

Combining a business-system perspective and a global value-chain perspective, I draw on French clothing import data and interviews to characterize the sourcing patterns of French clothing retailers and analyze their determinants. The dominant pattern identified is one of dispersed, unstable, and informal supplier relations, which can be explained by the importance of small specialized chains, the predominance of family and management ownership, and a low concentration level in French clothing retailing. Since the late 1990s, however, the largest retailers operating in the standard-product segment, some of them engaged in ‘financialization’ strategies, have launched supply-chain rationalization policies aimed at reducing the number of suppliers, stabilizing relations with preferred suppliers, and externalizing manufacturing-related services. A new sourcing model of Anglo-Saxon origin can thus be seen to be diffusing under the combined influence of concentration and financialization in the French clothing retail scene.

By using the main insights of the global value chains perspective and some of its critiques, we attempt to explain how Turkey has developed and sustained its export success as a full-package supplier of apparel during the 1990s and early 2000s. Towards this end, we first analyze the global dynamics that have facilitated Turkey's incorporation into global value chains and the development of full-package production. Second, we outline the key strategies which Turkish full-package suppliers have employed to meet international standards, typically associated with this export role. Third, we show that all of these developments have unfolded against a national context, unique features of which have further helped Turkey to sustain its competitiveness in this export role. Our analysis shows that, in the Turkish national context, more attention should be given to the role of business associations and the state.

After a period in the 1990s of rapid integration into the production and trade networks of the European Union (EU) (and to a lesser extent of the United States), clothing manufacturers in East and Central Europe have had to adjust quickly to the changing costs of production with EU accession, the rise of Chinese exports, and the 1 January 2005 final phaseout of quantitative quotas into major markets. In this paper we focus on the changing competitive pressures on clothing producers in the region and on the diversity of adjustments currently being made in response to these changes. In particular, we detail the wide range of adjustment strategies being adopted by firms in Slovakia and Bulgaria, and show how interregional price competition, downgrading, and geographical shifts in patterns of sourcing and production are articulated with imperatives to regionalized production for major markets, stabilization of supply networks, industrial upgrading, and the expansion of localized sourcing and domestic-marketing strategies.

India, a late integrator in the global market for clothing, has followed a path to integration that is quite different from the experience of some of its major competitors. Unlike China, Mexico, Eastern Europe, and other South Asian countries, India's recent surge in clothing exports has occurred despite the lack of major foreign direct investment in textile and apparel production, the lack of entry into preferential regional trade agreements with buyer countries, or the lack of any significant direct role of global buyers. Arguing that changes in domestic policy and in the structure of domestic demand throughout the 1980s and 1990s played an important role in triggering new growth in India's textiles and apparel exports, and in reshaping the capabilities of local firms, I examine three features of India's recent integration into global clothing markets: the striking emergence of design as a source of comparative advantage in Indian apparel, the growing importance of outward-bound investment by Indian clothing firms in recent years, and the powerful new role that retail is playing in organizing the Indian domestic market, driven in part by surging consumer demand from entirely new mid-market youth segments associated with the country's information technology–business process outsourcing boom.

Theorists concerned with processes of urban citizenship have not accounted for their connections to a changing national citizenship regime and their internal dynamics, notably as they relate to evolving Aboriginal/indigenous rights. Using transformations in the low-cost-housing sector in Winnipeg, Canada as the empirical basis, I examine how changes in the trajectories of social and Aboriginal citizenship have intersected at the urban scale. This is done by combining document and policy analyses with data from thirty-seven semistructured personal interviews with Aboriginal and nonAboriginal housing actors. Following changes to federally driven social-housing policy in 1993, housing stakeholders in Winnipeg self-organised to engage all sectors of society in processes of urban citizenship around low-cost-housing goals. Aboriginal citizenship pursuits have not been interwoven with the pursuit of these social goals. There is a role for the federal government in ensuring the coupling of Aboriginal with urban social citizenship.

There is a small but growing literature that promotes the derivation of distributions of willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates using information specific to each individual observation. These are referred to as individual conditional distributions, in contrast to approaches that rely on unconditional distributions that use random assignment in the construction of WTP distributions within a sampled population. The interest in alternative specifications is in large measure attributed to the search for empirical ways of deriving the WTP distribution that satisfies a behaviourally acceptable sign and range over the entire domain. In this paper we examine both conditional and unconditional approaches to establishing WTP distributions within the context of a mixed logit model. We find that calculating WTP measures from ratios of individual-level parameters in contrast to drawing them from unconditional population distributions empirically reduces the incidence of extreme values. Our results suggest that although problematic estimates cannot be ruled out, the use of the extra information on each individual's choices is a valuable input into the derivation of WTP distributions.