Disentangling the semi-periphery: evolutionary trajectories and perspectives of the Austrian and Hungarian automotive industries

Local economic development strategies in a medium-sized city on the European periphery: a path to become an economic center of Eastern Central Europe importance

“…Among the external reasons, reindustrialization plays an increasingly important role in today's global economic processes (Christopherson et al, 2014;Capello and Cerisola, 2023). In recent years, the Hungarian government has increasingly seen this as the key to economic recovery (Lengyel et al, 2017), and as the automotive industry plays a very important role in the Hungarian economy (Molnár et al, 2020;Pavlínek, 2022;Szalavetz and Sass, 2023). A key trend in the automotive industry today is the growing role of electromobility, and in the changed circumstances, the Hungarian government considered that its survival could only be ensured if the country is open to battery industry developments from the Far East (Czirfusz, 2023).…”

‘Space-time dents’ in global value chains – The Hungarian case

“…On the other hand, competitiveness requirements induce the investor firms to develop their facilities in Central and Eastern European countries, which overall results in increasing value added. Furthermore, the establishment of stand-alone large automotive R&D centres in Central and Eastern European countries also leads to higher local value added (reinforced not only by Megyeri et al 2023, but also by Otsuka et al (2023) and Gáspár et al (2023a)), however, these are more or less working independently of local production units and carry out rather 'extended workbench type R&D activities (Szalavetz -Sass 2023). The previously described case of measuring automotive value added calls our attention to the remaining methodological problems and to the fact that the data contain averages, from which the individual company cases can deviate to a great extent, raising the value of detailed company case studies.…”

“…Domestically owned companies do not figure highly among the local players (Molnár et al 2020;Gerőcs 2022), with the possible exception of Czechia (Pavlínek 2020). Thus, the four mentioned economies, including Hungary, belong to the integrated peripheries or semi-peripheries of automotive production (Pavlínek 2022;Szalavetz -Sass 2023).…”