Progress in Economic Geography最新文献

From market leader to follower: Windows of opportunity and insular home market effect in Japan’s lithium-ion battery industry 从市场领导者到追随者：日本锂离子电池行业的机会之窗和本土市场的孤立效应

Progress in Economic Geography Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-17 DOI: 10.1016/j.peg.2025.100060

Natsuki Kamakura , Kirsten Martinus

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Latecomer upgrading in relational supplier-buyer arrangements: The integration of German machinery firms in Chinese dominated electric vehicle battery production markets 关系供应商-买方安排中的后发升级：德国机械企业在中国主导的电动汽车电池生产市场中的整合

Progress in Economic Geography Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-16 DOI: 10.1016/j.peg.2025.100059

Olga Sorokina, Julian Schwabe

{"title":"Latecomer upgrading in relational supplier-buyer arrangements: The integration of German machinery firms in Chinese dominated electric vehicle battery production markets","authors":"Olga Sorokina, Julian Schwabe","doi":"10.1016/j.peg.2025.100059","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.peg.2025.100059","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Within technological transitions of the automotive industry, processing technology for the production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries is a highly relevant but thus far underresearched sector. Given the head-start of Chinese firms in developing industrial structures for battery production, this article examines the perspectives and development pathways of German machinery builders as they attempt to enter markets of EV battery production technology, currently led by Chinese machinery firms.</div><div>The article does so by combining concepts of value chain governance, technological upgrading and latecomer capability gaps. It finds that despite their traditional strength in processing technology, German machinery firms tend to occupy only market niches within EV-battery production. Based on a qualitative study, building on 11 expert interviews as main empirical basis, the article argues that the main challenges stem from the differences in the timing of market entry. Chinese machinery suppliers, as early adopters, have already built strong customer relationships and accumulated tacit knowledge about processing technology. This early start provides them sustained competitive advantage and creates high market entry barriers to latecomers. Firm-level upgrading options are sensitive not only to the sector and market timing, but also to the location. In markets where leading suppliers are already well established, latecomer firms may find their upgrading options constrained, whereas in other markets, where supplier-buyer linkages are still in their formative phase, such opportunities remain more accessible.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101047,"journal":{"name":"Progress in Economic Geography","volume":"4 1","pages":"Article 100059"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145841601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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China’s technological catch-up and leapfrogging in electric vehicles: A firm-level study of BYD and CATL 中国电动汽车的技术追赶与跨越：比亚迪与宁德时代的企业层面研究

Progress in Economic Geography Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-11-28 DOI: 10.1016/j.peg.2025.100054

Lindsay Whitfield , Tobias Wuttke

{"title":"China’s technological catch-up and leapfrogging in electric vehicles: A firm-level study of BYD and CATL","authors":"Lindsay Whitfield , Tobias Wuttke","doi":"10.1016/j.peg.2025.100054","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.peg.2025.100054","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines how Chinese firms BYD and CATL achieved technological catch-up and became global leaders in electric vehicles and EV batteries, disrupting the automotive industry. The global value chain (GVC) and global production network (GPN) approaches struggle to explain how latecomer firms not only join global networks but also transform into lead firms themselves. The article addresses this gap by integrating insights from the economics of innovation literature and putting firm-level technological effort at the centre of analysis. It develops and applies a technological catch-up matrix that captures firm-level effort across five dimensions: proprietary knowledge, organizational capabilities, capital investment, market demand, and local supporting nexus. The article finds that BYD and CATL’s success is based on their early investments in lithium-ion battery technology for EVs beginning in the mid-2000s, preceding and actively shaping government industrial policies rather than merely responding to them. Both firms leveraged existing capabilities from China’s consumer electronics battery sector while building automotive-specific knowledge and capabilities through strategic partnerships with incumbents and recruitment of foreign expertise. The article’s comparative analysis of BYD and CATL with other Chinese EV and EV battery firms demonstrates that while government industrial policies were necessary, firm-level technological effort was equally crucial for achieving market leadership. The article contributes to understanding latecomer industrialization by showing how firms escape subordinated positions in global production networks through systematic technological effort, challenging explanations that attribute China’s EV success exclusively to government intervention.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101047,"journal":{"name":"Progress in Economic Geography","volume":"4 1","pages":"Article 100054"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145885551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Exploring the geography of innovation and sustainability transitions in the bioeconomy 探索生物经济中创新和可持续性转型的地理位置

Progress in Economic Geography Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-06 DOI: 10.1016/j.peg.2025.100055

Sebastian Losacker , Teis Hansen , Daniel Schiller

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Regional capabilities in the European automotive industry: Relatedness, complexity and lock-ins in the transition to electric vehicles 欧洲汽车工业的区域能力：向电动汽车过渡的相关性、复杂性和锁定性

Progress in Economic Geography Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-10 DOI: 10.1016/j.peg.2025.100057

Tim Becker , Sebastian Losacker , Margherita Russo

{"title":"Regional capabilities in the European automotive industry: Relatedness, complexity and lock-ins in the transition to electric vehicles","authors":"Tim Becker , Sebastian Losacker , Margherita Russo","doi":"10.1016/j.peg.2025.100057","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.peg.2025.100057","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The shift toward battery electric vehicles (EVs) represents the most profound disruption in the automotive industry in over a century, with far-reaching consequences for European automotive regions. For decades, incremental improvements in internal combustion engine (ICE) technologies have served as the dominant decarbonization pathway, and many regions have built strong innovation systems around these legacy technologies. To assess how European NUTS2 regions are positioned for the transition to electric mobility, we analyze regional technological capabilities using technology-specific relatedness and knowledge complexity to investigate how EV- and ICE-related capabilities affect regional EV innovation. Using patent data from the OECD REGPAT database, we map regional innovation potentials and estimate econometric models to assess how these capability structures affect EV patenting. We find that higher relatedness density to EV technologies is positively associated with EV patenting, while relatedness to ICE improvements also shows a significant but weaker positive association, indicating that ICE capabilities do not necessarily impede EV innovation. However, when ICE-related capabilities substantially outweigh EV-related ones, we observe a negative effect on EV patenting, pointing to emerging lock-in risks. This effect is markedly stronger in low-complexity regions. Interregional co-patenting analysis shows that regions with low complexity and low EV-relatedness are doubly disadvantaged, as they are weakly positioned internally and less integrated into innovation networks. Focusing on four regions of this type, we illustrate how targeted partnerships could unlock untapped potentials. The results inform a policy discussion highlighting the need for place-sensitive innovation strategies addressing both emerging and legacy capability structures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101047,"journal":{"name":"Progress in Economic Geography","volume":"4 1","pages":"Article 100057"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145760843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Left-behind places in Latin America?: Refining the concept against the backdrop of extractivism in Tocopilla, Chile 拉丁美洲的留守地区？：在智利托科皮利亚的采掘活动背景下提炼这一概念

Progress in Economic Geography Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-18 DOI: 10.1016/j.peg.2026.100061

Sören Scholvin , Marcelo Lufin

{"title":"Left-behind places in Latin America?: Refining the concept against the backdrop of extractivism in Tocopilla, Chile","authors":"Sören Scholvin , Marcelo Lufin","doi":"10.1016/j.peg.2026.100061","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.peg.2026.100061","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The literature on ‘left-behind places’ has its roots in the Global North. Researchers have now begun to apply the concept to developing countries, unfortunately without discussing the specificities of Southern left-behind places in detail and making conceptual adjustments. Concentrating on Latin America, this article takes a first step towards closing the gap of knowledge on what left behindness means in the Global South. It presents Tocopilla, a town in the north of Chile, as a ‘place of discontent’ in a ‘commodities region’. Against the backdrop of expert interviews and data from secondary sources, the authors show that Tocopilla is marked by similar drawbacks as left-behind places in the North, but the corresponding causal mechanisms are different. In Latin America, places of discontent like Tocopilla play an essential role for extractivist systems, instead of being irrelevant to the national and global economy like their peers in Europe and North America. It is this very role that explains their dire situation, rather than deindustrialisation and/or a widening gap vis-à-vis dynamic metropoles. The authors also show that strategies of endogenous development, which have been suggested for left-behind places in the North, are not suitable. The logic of extractivism accounts for local practices that undermine economic dynamics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101047,"journal":{"name":"Progress in Economic Geography","volume":"4 1","pages":"Article 100061"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146078466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Analyzing legitimacy discourses in an emerging green hydrogen hub in Brazil 分析巴西新兴绿色氢中心的合法性话语

Progress in Economic Geography Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-16 DOI: 10.1016/j.peg.2025.100058

Christian Brannstrom , Felipe da Silva Freitas , Adryane Gorayeb

{"title":"Analyzing legitimacy discourses in an emerging green hydrogen hub in Brazil","authors":"Christian Brannstrom , Felipe da Silva Freitas , Adryane Gorayeb","doi":"10.1016/j.peg.2025.100058","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.peg.2025.100058","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Green hydrogen, an emerging energy carrier that may help achieve national and global decarbonization goals, will reshape energy geographies. States are partnering with firms, offering subsidies and other incentives for developing hubs as agglomerations of green hydrogen producers, off-takers, and exporters, while new and incumbent firms are seeking new accumulation opportunities through the production of green hydrogen. Legitimation processes are key to the implementation and dissemination of new technological systems, but they are not well understood in the context of emerging green hydrogen hubs. We analyze the content of legitimization discourses supporting a green hydrogen hub in Ceará state, northeastern Brazil, seeking to determine the emerging space-making processes. We focus on the cognitive dimension of legitimacy through analysis of ∼ 500 news articles published between 2020 and 2023 in two major media outlets reporting on the proposed green hydrogen hub. The findings describe cognitive legitimation discourses on territorial characteristics, global leadership, breaking from the past, urgency, and essential state action. Legitimation mobilized ideas about landscape, territory, place, scale, and development through normative and technical arguments. Application of the cognitive dimension of legitimation advances economic geographies by highlighting how sub-national organizations represent their territories as adding value for investors, how stakeholders mobilize ideas for de-risking new technologies by overstating benefits and obscuring possible risks to producing states, and how elites justify processes leading to new spatial configurations of low-carbon energy systems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101047,"journal":{"name":"Progress in Economic Geography","volume":"4 1","pages":"Article 100058"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145841599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

State-backed institutions and the electrification transition: Recoupling the UK automotive industry in an era of geoeconomic competition 国家支持的机构和电气化转型：在地缘经济竞争时代重新挂钩英国汽车工业

Progress in Economic Geography Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-05-30 DOI: 10.1016/j.peg.2026.100075

Alen Toplišek

{"title":"State-backed institutions and the electrification transition: Recoupling the UK automotive industry in an era of geoeconomic competition","authors":"Alen Toplišek","doi":"10.1016/j.peg.2026.100075","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.peg.2026.100075","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article investigates how state-backed institutions facilitate renewed rounds of investment, i.e., recoupling, in industries undergoing technological transformation. While the global production networks (GPNs) literature has largely focused on processes that lead to the creation of strategic coupling, and more recently on cases of decoupling amidst geopolitical upheaval, recoupling processes, and the leading role played by state-backed institutions in them, remain underexplored. By empirically examining the least-likely country case of the UK, the article traces the evolution of state-backed institutional support for the UK automotive industry, and then analyses the cases of Nissan Motor Manufacturing UK and Jaguar Land Rover to identify the mechanisms and roles performed by state-backed institutions within upgrading alliances to secure repeat investment as part of the automotive sector’s electrification transition. The article argues that innovation-supporting state-backed institutions, increasingly driven by geoeconomic competition, act as correctors of network failures to enhance the competitiveness of the investment sites that lead firms are considering as part of technological transformation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101047,"journal":{"name":"Progress in Economic Geography","volume":"4 1","pages":"Article 100075"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148184144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Globalisation, multinational companies, and regional well-being 全球化、跨国公司和地区福利

Progress in Economic Geography Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-21 DOI: 10.1016/j.peg.2026.100063

Piergiorgio Pilo , Andrea Ascani , Bianca Biagi

{"title":"Globalisation, multinational companies, and regional well-being","authors":"Piergiorgio Pilo , Andrea Ascani , Bianca Biagi","doi":"10.1016/j.peg.2026.100063","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.peg.2026.100063","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In recent years, a debate on the 'geography of discontent' emerged in the US and Europe, evidenced by the populist vote. Dissatisfaction, rooted in anti-globalisation sentiments, particularly affects areas with intense EU trade links and a significant presence of foreign multinational companies (MNCs), as seen in the pro-Brexit vote. This underscores the need to incorporate global exposure in life satisfaction discussions, focusing on MNCs as stable actors in global markets. The activities of MNCs impact their locations economically, socially, environmentally, and institutionally, exerting an influence on the quality of life and well-being of residents. The net impact of MNCS on local well-being can be positive if, across all domains, the total benefits outweigh the costs or negative in the opposite situation. This paper examines the relationship between regional subjective well-being (SWB) and the presence of MNCs of 190 NUTS 2 regions across 24 European countries during 2012–2016. The dataset considers average life satisfaction from the European Social Survey and MNCs from Orbis-Bureau Van Dijk. Findings indicate that, on average, the presence of MNCs in EU regions is associated with lower levels of SWB, confirming the negative impact of globalisation and overall discontent.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":101047,"journal":{"name":"Progress in Economic Geography","volume":"4 1","pages":"Article 100063"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146078467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Editorial: The man who predicted Trump: Trying out Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism in economic geography 社论：预测特朗普的人：在经济地理学中尝试理查德·罗蒂的新实用主义

Progress in Economic Geography Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-20 DOI: 10.1016/j.peg.2026.100062

Trevor J. Barnes

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