Manufacturing Reshoring in Advanced Economies: an open dialogue between International Business and Economic Geography

This event is part of the Department of Strategy and International Business Research Seminar Series.

Speaker: Diletta Pegoraro (PhD Candidate, Birmingham Business School)

Synopsis

In the last ten years, many firms have changed their manufacturing location strategies. Some now prefer to focus their production domestically either by engaging with local suppliers or by bringing back previously offshored manufacturing activities. This phenomenon, known as 'manufacturing reshoring’, has attracted the interest of many scholars in several fields. Drawing on the open dialogue between International Business and Economic Geography, this research applies an interdisciplinary approach by focusing on the Global Value Chain framework. Many studies have used the GVC framework for exploring possible territorial upgrading, but very few have used the framework for researching developed countries, especially at the sub-national regional level. A web-based survey was conducted in three sub-national regions (Veneto, West Midlands and California), obtaining 276 usable responses. A multinomial logit model was applied to analyze the preferred choice of a firm’s management among several mutually exclusive manufacturing reshoring strategies. The results suggest that elements of Industry 4.0 are significant for adopting a manufacturing reshoring strategy, despite differences between the sub-national regions.

The speaker

Diletta studied for the MSc in International Business at the Cà Foscari University of Venice, during which she was also a visiting scholar at the Duke University Global Values Chains Center. She is now completing her PhD at the University of Birmingham. Her doctoral research is on manufacturing reshoring and its determinants at the sub-national level, and is supervised by Prof Lisa De Propris and Dr Agnieszka Chidlow. Diletta has presented her work to national and international conferences (e.g. RSA Lugano 2018, AIBUK&I 2018, EIBA 2019 and AISRE 2019). She also attended Masters classes in International Business and Economic Geography at the Henley Business School and won a scholarship from The Alan Rugman Memorial Fund.

Her doctoral research was supported by the Horizon 2020- Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project MAKERS: Smart Manufacturing for EU Growth and Prosperity. In this project, she worked with international scholars and was seconded to the Reshoring Institute in the USA, the Centre for Research and Studies at the Union Chamber of Veneto in Italy, and the National University of Singapore. In addition to her doctoral research, Diletta is an active member of the AIB Community, serving as an officer of the Research Methodology Strategic Interest Group (RM-SIG) and on the organizing committee of the Annual Responsible Research Methods Symposium held at the Birmingham Business School.