Global Production Networks: Theorizing Economic Development in an Interconnected World

Accelerating processes of economic globalization have fundamentally reshaped the organization of the global economy towards much greater integration and functional interdependence through cross-border economic activity. In this interconnected world system, a new form of economic organization has emerged: Global Production Networks (GPNs). This brings together a wide array of economic actors, most notably capitalist firms, state institutions, labour unions, consumers and non-government organizations, in the transnational production of economic value.

National and sub-national economic development in this highly interdependent global economy can no longer be conceived of, and understood within, the distinct territorial boundaries of individual countries and regions. Instead, global production networks are organizational platforms through which actors in these different national or regional economies compete and cooperate for a larger share of the creation, transformation, and capture of value through transnational economic activity. They are also vehicles for transferring the value captured between different places.

This book ultimately aims to develop a theory of global production networks that explains economic development in the interconnected global economy. While primarily theoretical in nature, it is well grounded in cutting-edge empirical work in the parallel and highly impactful strands of social science literature on the changing organization of the global economy relating to global commodity chains (GCC), global value chains (GVC), and global production networks (GPN).

Neil M. Coe, Professor of Economic Geography and Co-Director, GPN@NUS Centre, National University of Singapore,Henry Wai-chung Yeung, Professor of Economic Geography and Co-Director, GPN@NUS Centre, National University of Singapore

Neil M. Coe is Professor of Economic Geography at the National University of Singapore. His research interests are in the areas of global production networks and local economic development; the geographies of local and transnational labour markets; the geographies of innovation; and institutional and network approaches to economic development. He has published over 75 articles and book chapters on these topics, and is a co-author of Spaces of Work: Global Capitalism and the Geographies of Labour (Sage, London, 2003) and Economic Geography: A Contemporary Introduction (Wiley, NJ, 2013, second edn.). He is an Editor of the Journal of Economic Geography and Director of the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography.


Henry Wai-chung Yeung is Professor of Economic Geography and Co-Director of GPN@NUS Centre at the National University of Singapore. His research interests cover global production networks, East Asian firms, and the political economy of development. He is the author of Transnational Corporations and Business Networks (Routledge, 1998), Entrepreneurship and the Internationalisation of Asian Firms (Edward Elgar, 2002), and Chinese Capitalism in a Global Era (Routledge, 2004). He has published 7 edited books, over 85 academic journal articles, and 40 book chapters. He is Editor of Environment and Planning A and Economic Geography, and serves on 20 other international journals.