This book offers conceptual and empirical insights from economic geography to explore how uncertainties, crises, and risks, shape, reshape, and ultimately transform the spatial arrangements of companies and regions. This book provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape of economic interactions amidst contemporary challenges. It explores concepts such as global value chains, global production networks, regional resilience, and the impact of crises, risks, and uncertainties on spatial economic patterns. Case studies from various regions, nations, and industries, including lesser researched sectors such as medical technology and the restaurant and bar industry offer tangible and real-world manifestations of these dynamics. Through its comprehensive coverage and interdisciplinary approach, this book equips readers with practical knowledge applicable to academia and real-world contexts. It offers a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between economic geography and contemporary challenges at a variety of levels. The book provides valuable perspectives for academics, practitioners, and policy makers in the fields of Economic Geography, Regional Studies, Political Sciences, Economic Sociology, Economics, and International Business Studies.

This timely volume provides a thorough analysis of current trends in location and relocation of economic activity globally, regionally and locally. Using robust empirical material this book offers a multidisciplinary, comprehensive overview, critique and extension of long-established theories underpinning patterns of firm (re)location. It explores dominant trends in the mobility and relocation of industries and firms, examines the factors guiding such trends and evaluates their consequences in both developed and emerging economies in Europe, Asia and Latin America. This book will be appreciated by diverse audiences. Geography and regional science researchers of ‘economic activity location’ can engage with the critical appraisal of key theoretical concepts and an analysis of recent empirical data. Students of human and economic geography, planning, regional development, and global supply chain management in senior years of undergraduate programmes and completing postgraduate degrees will appreciate the accessible language, multiple examples and graphical illustrations of theoretical frameworks underpinning location and relocation of firms and industries, and its consequences. Practitioners, including local and regional policy makers and location consultants will enjoy the comparative discussion of solutions and practices adopted in localities, regions and countries as diverse as China, Brazil, The Netherlands and Poland.

To what extent can regions diverge from established paths of economic development? Are their futures determined by institutional and industrial structures that may be hundreds of years old or do innovations, transfers, and adaptations of knowledge, technology, learning systems, and policy mechanisms offer realistic opportunities for regional development? Rethinking Regional Innovation and Change: Path Dependency or Regional Breakthrough? brings together papers from leading international scholars in the field of regional development and policy. The contributors examine the interactions between path-dependent developments, institutions, and governance structures that influence regional innovation capacity. Using cases from both highly developed and less developed regions, they explore the complex relationships between technical and industrial development paths and regional institutions. They assess the extent to which regional innovative capacity can be increased by strengthening, re-orienting, or creating institutions and policies, and they examine opportunities for reflexive practice at the regional level as a critical tool in orienting regional development. Up-to-date case studies present diverse theoretical perspectives from economics, political science, geography, planning, and public policy. This volume will be of particular interest to researchers, analysts, and policymakers in the fields of regional development, innovation policy, and institutional and organizational change, as well as faculty and students in public policy, public administration, planning, geography, regional economics, and economic development.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

The world economy has undergone rapid evolution in recent decades, along with changes in the importance of industries and their organization, and sharp changes in the fortunes of regions. There are differences of opinion regarding the mainsprings of change and development and the role of goverments in fostering national output. In order to show the relvance of these changes to regional economies, the book focuses on the different schools of economic thought - from the neo-classical, through Keynesian to Marxist/radical ideas and monetarist/supply-side thinking - providing a brief description of their structure in non-spatial terms. The way these theories map into contrasting ideas regarding the mechanisms of regional economic growth is then explained. The book concentrates on developed economies and explicitly seeks to confront theory with fact, fact with theory. Bringing together non-spatial economic thery, regional growth theory and relevant empirical data, this book is intended for students in geography and regional economics but will also be of interest for those studying politics and government.

Risk management is a domain of management which comes to the fore in crisis. This book looks at risk management under crisis conditions in the COVID-19 pandemic context. The book synthesizes existing concepts, strategies, approaches and methods of risk management and provides the results of empirical research on risk and risk management during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research outcome was based on the authors’ study on 42 enterprises of different sizes in various sectors, and these firms have either been negatively affected by COVID-19 or have thrived successfully under the new conditions of conducting business activities. The analysis looks at both the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the selected enterprises and the risk management measures these enterprises had taken in response to the emerging global trends. The book puts together key factors which could have determined the enterprises’ failures and successes. The final part of the book reflects on how firms can build resilience in challenging times and suggests a model for business resilience. The comparative analysis will provide useful insights into key strategic approaches of risk management. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003131366/ has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.