Global Production Networks and Dynamic Cores in the World’s Main Nodes: The Technological-Productive Transition of the Automotive Industry

Abstract

The global production networks (GPNs) perspective, to account for key aspects of the new global space, takes on its full dimension from a theoretical-methodological approach to capitalism in terms of historical-spatial phases of development, implying the existence of industrial cycles differentiated by their dynamic core. The global automotive industry is undergoing a profound transformation due to the transition to electric and autonomous vehicles. Under its preceding technological-productive base, it had become part of the automotive-mechanical-metal-petrochemical complex that constituted the dynamic core of the Fordist-Keynesian development phase. Underlying this transition is a process of technological-productive revolutionization in the industry by the electronic-informatics and telecommunications sector, which constitutes the dynamic core of a new industrial cycle typical of the current phase of development. This implies a changing technological-productive base and a spatial and hierarchical reconfiguration of the automotive industry, with macro-regions and new leading countries, old leading macro-regions and countries that have become second-tier players, and new competing countries; with the deployment of new GPNs involving the dynamic cores of global nodes within macro-regions. This article concludes that the actual further regionalization of GPNs between the dynamic cores is in contradiction to the necessary global sourcing of key elements of the industry.