The Political Economy of Special Economic Zones

Multi-Actors’ Stakes and Strategies: Tangier Med Free Zones Group’s Case

“…According to the literature, the state involvement in free zones is limited to investment in the projects and providing necessary juridical support (Sonobe & Otsuka 2006;Aggarwal 2010;Hsu et al 2013;Moberg 2015), while others work to mention the Local government as the "key salesman" for local free zones and that it plays a crucial role in developing those zones (Sosnovskikh 2017). This emphases the correlation between promoting industrial sectors and the free zone development, also, sheds light on the essence of the "entrepreneurial state" (Mazzucato 2015).…”

Industrial clusters in Russia: The development of special economic zones and industrial parks

“…The choice to enter a particular economic zone is based on a number of key factors, such as proximity to resources, tax benefits, the potential of cooperation with other companies inside and outside the zone, and labor resources (Aggarwal, 2010;Moberg, 2015;Wang, 2013). Investors come to industrial economic zones in Russia for similar reasons -to be close to potential markets and to reduce production costs by locating manufacturing sites close to these markets and resources.…”

“…The local government determines how quickly the industrial cluster is established, registered, approved in a particular region, and funded. The literature has found that state involvement in the development of SEZs or industrial parks is limited only in terms of investing in the projects and providing necessary juridical support (Aggarwal, 2010;Hsu et al, 2013;Moberg, 2015;Sonobe and Otsuka, 2006). This Russian pheno-menon implies that the more active a local government is in promoting industrial clusters in its region, the more SEZs and industrials are developed.…”

“…Moreover, the respondents did not notice much active cooperation among the companies in the zone, and they did not manage to clarify the reasons for this lack of cooperation. According to the literature, the causes can be different, for instance, an inappropriate concept for the economic zone (Farole, 2011;Kirk, 2014;Moberg, 2015;Yankov et al, 2016) or a major restriction of knowledge sharing and collaboration activities among firms due to the Russian mentality (Dickenson and Blundell, 2000;Ivanov, 2016;Kuznetsova and Roud, 2014;Levin and Satarov, 2000;Longenecker and Popovski, 1994;Michailova and Husted, 2003). In general, investors come to clusters due to the basic laws of the market economy, which do not depend on the SEZ or industrial park models.…”

Bringing the benefits of David to Goliath: special economic zones and institutional improvement

“…But while there have been many works researching these second-order effects of SEZs (see, inter alia, Rosemary et al 1988or Wang 2013, there is less understanding of the first-order effects. In particular, the channels in which policy reform benefits would arise in an SEZ have for the most part been assumed away, with only Moberg (2015) attempting to put SEZs into a political economy framework. If SEZs are to allow for policy experimentation and support policy reform, how would this flow back to the rest of the country?…”