Transnational Integration and Specialization in the 2000s

Abstract

This chapter completes the account of trajectories of globalization by examining patterns of structural transformation and how these cumulatively led individual Central and Eastern European economies towards new international roles in world market integration during the 2000s. Over time, legacy factors matter increasingly less while the politics of adjustment came to matter much more. The chapter uses comparative data to trace patterns of structural transformation leading states to adopt one of the three distinct roles in international market integration: assembly platform, intermediate producer, and combined. The chapter defines the international market integration of small, developing states in a globalized economy as the structural position the nation’s industry assumes within global production networks. The concept incorporates both the aggregate role a nation’s industry holds in global value chains and the associated (national) political economy or institutional framework within which the organization of industrial activity takes place.