The Geographical Consequences of the End of Quota Constrained Trade in the Global Apparel Industry

This project analyzes the combined effects of apparel trade liberalization, supply chain restructuring, and the emerging geographies of economic governance and regulation. It involves collaborative research, funded by the United States National Science Foundation, with John Pickles (Geography, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), Gary Gereffi (Sociology, Duke University) and Meenu Tewari (City and Regional Planning, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill).

The project is particularly important in that January 1, 2005 marked the end of the final phase of quota removal and the end of the trade regime governed by the Multi-Fibre Arrangement and its system of regulated trade, a system that governed international trade in textiles and clothing for over thirty years. The phasing out of the quota regime corresponds with major changes in the organization and practices of the global apparel industry and has enormous implications for employment patterns and economic development in many regions of the world. The research contributes to the analysis of this important industry as it undergoes a transition from one trade regime to another and to the ways in which we understand and explain industrial outsourcing, de-localization and job loss, and the emerging economic geographies of production (particularly the broader geographical consequences of the emergence of China and India as major low-cost producers).

The research examines three questions:

• 1. patterns of production, trade, and supply chain governance emerging in response to trade deregulation, documenting the major changes in the volume, direction, and composition of trade in apparel, and identifying the determinants of the patterns of apparel sourcing and production and how these determinants have changed with changes in trade regime.
• 2. The emergence of new forms of economic governance in the industry, how these new institutional and industrial actors interact, cooperate, andcompete to shape the emerging post-quota trade regime, and how technology, cognitive frameworks and understandings, as well as geographically specific institutions and agents, are transforming the organization of the industry itself. It analyzes two aspects of economic governance that are emerging to manage risk and costs in the face of the intensifying post-quota competition: (i) industrial and organizational upgrading, specifically upgrading the value chain, technological investment, and local institutional and market development; and (ii) the deployment of spatial practices such trans-border networking, logistical restructuring, upstream and downstream integration, clustering, and regional and global sourcing.
• 3. the role of emerging institutions, actors, and practices in a post-quota trade regime (specifically international standards, codes of conduct, work norms, and compliance monitoring, as well as the continued roles played by tariffs, safeguards, and related instruments of trade policy). The project contributes to our understanding of the spatial dimensions of global commodity and value chain dynamics, the changing role of regional production networks and new institutional actors, and the ways in which we understand competitiveness and regional comparative advantage.

The research combines country- and industry-level analyses, detailed and comparative firm- and regional-level case studies, and interviews with apparel manufacturers, representatives of organized labour, manufacturers and retailers, and industry, government, and non-government officials. The research is structured to provide comparative case studies of key product sectors and supply chain restructuring in key countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and South Asia. The project period is three years.