Europe's Auto Industry: Global Production Networks and Spatial Change

Drawing on the analytical approaches of global production networks, global value chains, and spatial divisions of labor, this book investigates the changing automotive industry in Europe. Petr Pavlínek is a leading scholar of the automotive industry and here he focuses on its restructuring and geographic reorganization since the early 1990s to analyze the driving forces and regional development effects of these changes. Pavlínek explains the spatial profit-seeking strategies of large automotive firms and their role in the restructuring and increasing internationalization of Europe's automotive industry through foreign direct investment. He also considers how rapid growth in eastern Europe has affected western Europe, evaluates the relative position of countries in the European automotive industry, and examines the transition to the production of electric vehicles in eastern Europe. Europe's Auto Industry features original data along with concepts and methods that may be applied in economic geography, economics, industrial sociology and development studies.