Europe S Automotive Industry On The Move

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.

Foreword A famous Portuguese Poet once said around one hundred years ago; “before I was born all the words that should save the Humanity had already been written.., the only thing that was missing was to save Humanity.” Fast forward to the 21st century services led and knowledge based economy, and we have myriads of theoretical study about the decisive assets – namely intangibles. Those analysis are made in several perspectives, namely Human Resources, Knowledge Management, Intellectual Capital, and also many sectorial perspectiveslike Trade, Economics, Logistics, Social Policy etc. However, today the question about the applicability of all these studies remains unsolved. So, it like, many of the words that will save the Knowledge Economy have already been written, all we need is to save the Knowledge Economy…Or is it not? The idea behind TAKE Conference was to provide a multidisciplinary forum in which those multiple perspectives will come together. We believe it is a fruitful operation and we intend to continue the exercise in the future. The problem of the relation between theory and practice in the knowledge economy is getting more important and not lessimportant with the development of the BRICS and other nations. TAKE main question will be one of the problems of the 21st century. Following the promising start of TAKE 2016 in Aveiro, Portugal, TAKE 2017 was organized by the Faculty of Economics of Zagreb University, around Prof. Blazenka Knezevic. I would like to thank her and her team for the massive effort in putting TAKE 2017 together. It will be a very nice and memorable conference. I would like also to thank the 5 keynotes, the special sessions and workshop organizes, the authors of the 60 papers and 5 posters, the stream leaders, the reviewers and the sponsors for the efforts. And to the 90 participants from 20 countries: Austria, Bosnia‐Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Netherlands, Mexico, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States. A special word to Prof. Gaby Neumann from Wildau who organized the Proceedings. Let us make TAKE 2017 a great occasion and help save the knowledge economy a bit. Eduardo Tomé, Conference Chair Zagreb, July 2017

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.

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.

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Economic Geography, grade: 1,7, University of Lisbon, course: Industriegeographie, Geografia de Industria, language: English, abstract: Wirtschaftsgeographie, Arbeit über geographische Verteilung und Dynamik sowie den Einfluss von betriebswirtschaftlichen Organisation- und Produktionsformen auf die geographische Verteilung der Automobilindustrie. Blick auf portugiesische Automobilindustrie

This book is the product of four years of collaborative work within the framework of the European Science Foundation's Regional and Urban Restructuring in Europe (RURE) programme. With one exception, all of the chapters have been prepared by participants in RURE - the exception being that commissioned from Conti and Enrietti on Fiat and Italy to provide a fuller coverage of changes in the main automobile producing companies and countries of Europe. A - perhaps the - central theme around which the RURE programme was conceived is that the restructuring of the production system lies at the heart of the changing map of Europe. Equally, it continues to be the case that the automobile industry lies at the cutting edge of the search for viable new models of production. Some eighty years ago the automobile industry occupied a pivotal position in the transition from craft to mass production - indeed "Fordism" came to denote not just a particular micro-economic model of production organisation in the factory but a macro-scale model of economic development, characterized by a particular pattern of relations between mass production, mass consumption and national state regulation. From the late 1960s, however, it became increasingly clear that Fordism as a macro-scale model of advanced capitalist development was reaching its limits.

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.