The automotive industry is a major pillar of the modern global economy and one of Europe’s key industries. There can hardly be any doubt about the important role of this sector as an engine for employment, growth and innovation in Europe, and there are crucial challenges and opportunities ahead. The authors shed light on a broad range of issues – globalisation and restructuring, trade and foreign direct investment, innovation, regulation, and industry policy – and put a special focus on the new member states. While change may be inevitable, progress is not. This book shall serve as a map to all stakeholders: business executives and policy makers, investors and scholars.

This book chronicles the divergent growth trends in car production in Belgium and Spain. It delves into how European integration, high wages, and the demise of GM and Ford led to plant closings in Belgium. Next, it investigates how lower wages and the expansion strategies of Western European automakers stimulated expansion in the Spanish auto industry. Finally, it offers three alternate scenarios regarding how further EU expansion and Brexit may potentially reshape the geographic footprint of European car production over the next ten years. In sum, this book utilizes history to help expand the knowledge of scholars and policymakers regarding how European integration and Brexit may impact future auto industry investment for all EU nations.

The New European Automobile Industry is about the struggle for survival going on among the assembler and components firms which constitute the European automobile industry. It describes and explains the competitive, structural, organisational and technological changes currently sweeping the industry and outlines the spatial and economic effects of those changes. The empirical core of the book is a study of a number of technology fields in automobile components. These sections draw on the latest research carried out by the authors in Europe through which they evaluate the extent to which lean production techniques have permeated the vehicle assemblers and components industry.

This study examines a crucial period in European integration, ending in the early 1990s, when significant progress was made towards the dream of a unified European market. It shows how European automakers were part of these changes and how their influence within the institutions of the European Union (EU) yielded a wide range of policy compromises governing a single European car market. The book begins by reviewing the history of the EU and the logic of regional free trade, and goes on to develop a political explanation for the kinds of changes that actually occurred. The author argues that European automakers enjoyed a privileged place in the political arena, albeit one much transformed by the new institutions of the EU. Therefore, these firms often significantly influenced regional policy outcomes. The argument is applied to policymaking in the important areas of environmental regulation, trade, subsidies, and anti-trust regulation. This work lies at the intersection of business, economics, and political science and is of interest to both experts and non-specialists with an interest in the tremendous economic and political changes brought about by the creation of a united Europe and, more generally, by the worldwide process of regional economic integration. Academics, professionals, businessmen, and leaders in government all have something to learn from the way in which firms and governments combined to build the largest car market in the world. Roland Stephen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, North Carolina State University.

Laux carefully examines how European factory owners emulated American success in production and sales between the wars, how the postwar market boom chipped away at American dominance of the industry, and how Japanese models in turn began to cut into the world market in the competitive 1980s. In this incisive overview, Laux determines that Europe's most successful automaking firms were generally those which identified a market and offered this market a product at a reasonable price.

This book examines the dramatic increase in automotive assembly plants in the former Socialist Central European (CE) nations of Czechia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia from 1989 onwards. Enticed by relatively lower-wage labour and significant government incentives, the world’s largest automakers have launched more than 20 passenger car assembly complexes in CE nations, with production accelerating dramatically since 2001. As a result, the annual passenger car production in Western Europe declined by more than 20% between 2001 and 2015, and alternatively in the CEE it increased by nearly 170% during this period. Drawing on case studies of 25 current and former foreign-run assembly plants, the author presents a rare historical account of automotive foreign assembly plants in the CE following this dramatic geographic shift. This book will expand the knowledge of policy-makers in Europe in relation to their pursuits of FDI and will be of great interest to scholars and students of business, economic history, political science, and development.