“One thing leads to another”, but where? – Gateway cities and the geography of production linkages

Abstract

Although it has been argued that current configurations of extractive industries provide opportunities for developing production linkages, in other words, that “one thing leads to another”, these opportunities are not necessarily realised directly in the resource‐holding countries. This article aims to explain why the greater opportunities for creating increased production linkages may remain unrealised. While existing research on production linkages is characterised by a national scale mode of analysis, this article examines production linkages in the resource‐poor gateway city of Singapore that are intended to serve oil and gas operations at the macro‐regional level in Indonesia and Vietnam. The results reveal that a significant depth and breadth of production linkages have unfolded in Singapore, highlighting that in particular sophisticated production linkages tend to have a broader geographic scope. Moreover, the analysis identifies factors that have shifted the territorial scale of labour‐intensive and low‐technology production linkages from a macro‐regional towards a national or subnational level, to the advantage of the resource‐holding countries. These insights add some complexity to the study of production‐linkage development and emphasise the need for a multi‐scalar perspective that does not stop at national borders.

Gateways or backdoors to development? Filtering mechanisms and territorial embeddedness in the Chilean copper GPN’s urban system

“…Furthermore, these extractive hinterlands are characterised by high costs of living, lack of land for business development, negative externalities related to the mining activities, weak connectivity, and a small stock of labour force (Arias‐Loyola & Vergara‐Perucich, 2020; Atienza et al., 2020). This situation has deep historical roots and is partially explained by the second filtering mechanism proposed by Breul and Revilla Díez (2019) focused on the role of institutions.…”

“…Literature on gateway cities has been explicit on the fact that these cities can produce what Burger et al (2015) call “agglomeration shadows” limiting economic development in their surrounding areas. Furthermore, in some cases, these cities are not able to properly integrate resources peripheries into GPN leading to forms of structural matching (Breul et al., 2019; Breul & Revilla Díez, 2019). Perhaps one of the limitations of the gateway cities' literature is that it has tended to use a very broad conception of peripheral areas.…”

Endogenous Obstacles to Development in Global Value Chains: Insights From the Oil and Gas Sector

“…A case study on Cape Town by Scholvin (2017) shows that this city plays such a positive role in spite of certain limitations, which are further investigated in this analytical report. Yet, other scholars – especially Breul and Revilla Diez (2019) as well as Breul et al (2019) – argue that gateways may also concentrate economic activities to the detriment of subordinate places. The prospects of developing countries are, therefore, reduced to resource extraction and generic services such as catering, security, and transport of personnel.…”

The brokerage roles of city-regions in global corporate networks

“…On one hand, largely qualitative accounts of brokerage look to explain the underlying processes in city-regions by focussing on the stakeholders, actors, governance structures, and agents shaping various intermediary functions (Price and Benton- Short, 2008;Scholvin et al, 2019;Breul and Revilla-Diez, 2019). A common thread is that city-regions require unique occupational competencies, governance structures, and infrastructures to accommodate the intermediation of financial, digital, and physical flows (Akhavan, 2019;Krijnen et al, 2017).…”