Tying the Firm to the Region or Tying the Region to the Firm?

Abstract

In 1996 the Korean conglomerate LG announced plans to create up to 6100 jobs at a new greenfield electronics manufacturing operation in Newport, South Wales. The investment would have been unthinkable without the unique institutional capacity involved with inward investment attraction and development which exists in Wales. However, the scale of the LG investment has placed enormous demands on this institutional capacity and raises questions regarding the way in which major investments effectively capture the strategic orientation and resources of local institutions and serviceproviding organizations. In this article we explore some of the main dimensions of such institutional capture as revealed by an initial examination of the LG case.

Revealed competition for greenfield investments between European regions

“…To the casual observer, the most intense competition between European regions in recent decades was in the 1990s when a series of very large investment projects in manufacturing was being offered up as Japanese, Korean, and German companies internationalised (Phelps et al, 1998;Phelps and Tewdwr-Jones, 2001). On the one hand, our research also indicates that competition is fiercest for these large numbers of jobs in production plants since investments in these segments (low-tech manufacturing, process industries, and production plants) are relatively footloose in that they do not have very specific location requirements.…”

“…As indicated by Phelps et al (1998), Gordon (1999 and Raines (2004), territorial competition would then also be most prevalent for the more standardized investments such as production plants.…”

Exploring the Regional Distribution of Inbound Foreign Direct Investment in the UK in Theory and Practice: Evidence from a Five-Region Study

“…Existing research (for example, Stopford and Strange, 1991;Munday, 1992 and1995;Phelps et al, 1998;Loewendahl, 2001a;Dunning, 2002) suggests that regional, national and international factors all work together in attracting inbound FDI to particular regions in small, advanced industrial countries such as the UK. TNC's investment location decision making can be seen as being governed by a hierarchical structure, in which decisions to invest are taken firstly at a continental level, before attention moves Loewendahl, 2001a;.…”

Industry-academe linkages in the Philippines: Embedding foreign investors, capturing institutions?

“…The 'dark side' of integration into GPNs is that regions may lose some control to global actors (Coe and Hess, 2011;Phelps et al, 1998) or become locked-in into rigid specialisations (Grabher, 1993). The opportunity for manufacturing firms to capture institutional resources has been recognised by scholars (Phelps, 2000(Phelps, , 2008.…”