Contenu du sommaire : Manufacturing Renaissance (1/2)

?The paper aims to contribute to the renaissance of a manufacturing oriented view of economic system. ? It begins by providing a critical review of the main turning points in the manufacturing versus services debate evaluating the analytical and empirical arguments deployed in favor of each view. It goes on to describe the profound transformations in industrial systems and the redistribution of manufacturing production across countries over the last two decades which challenge some of the assumptions on which the service oriented view is built. This section concludes by reviewing old and new rationales supporting a manufacturing oriented view. The second part of the paper addresses the importance of certain industries, including machine tools to generate industrial capability and why technological linkages stemming from manufacturing industries more generally are key enablers of a country's systemic capacity to generate technological change. Finally the negative consequences of de-linking manufacturing production from services (off-shoring) are explored highlighting the systematic disruption of the bundle of technological linkages constituting the industrial commons.

‪At the heart of the differences between Germany and France we find several large industrial sectors: car-making, other transport equipment, electronic equipment and capital goods, metallurgy, and to a lesser extent chemicals. ‪ In these sectors we find: significantly higher export price elasticity in France than in Germany, something that reflects a lower level of sophistication; a far stronger increase in labour productivity in Germany than in France. A far more positive trend in profit margins in Germany than in France; a link between the level of sophistication and consumption of sophisticated services (R&D, IT, training); far more rapid total factor productivity growth in Germany than in France, in all the sectors, in particular in the “key” sectors for the difference between France and Germany. Capital intensity is increasing in nearly all sectors in France like in Germany. The difference between Germany and France, which explains the gaps in terms of level of sophistication of production, productivity gains and margins, therefore does not stem from the effort to accumulate capital, but from the quality of capital invested, as is shown by changes in total factor productivity and consumption of sophisticated services.

?Supplier firms selling intermediate inputs/goods to other producers operate and even proliferate in both developed and developing countries, especially after the considerable decline in vertical integration occurred within most industries in the last decades. In the past, most of the studies investigating their relative performance have documented a profitability and productivity gap in which suppliers were disadvantaged relative to other producers (final firms). However, the recent globalization of intermediate goods markets has had important repercussions on suppliers of mature industrial countries like Italy, compelled to face low-cost competitors and to develop the technical and relational capabilities needed to connect themselves with the large buyers and assemblers operating in Global Value Chains (GVCs). As a result, suppliers which have best managed to adapt to changes may have obtained significant improvements in their performance. This view is supported by the theoretical framework proposed by the Global Value Chain Approach (GVCA) initiated by Gereffi (1994). According to this stream of literature, whether and how supplier firms are inserted into GVCs is crucial in determining their productivity. In particular, GVCs with advanced governance relations (relational GVCs) require suppliers to become directly involved in strategic stages of production: as a consequence of their participation in this type of chains, suppliers receive the incentives and opportunities to raise their productivity to the extent that the gap between them and final firms can be eliminated. To assess the validity of the GVCA predictions, an empirical investigation is carried out in this paper to estimate the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) of an unbalanced panel of 5137 Italian industrial firms for the period 1998-2006. Comparing the TFP of supplier and final firms, in most industries statistically significant differences are found for less capable, non-innovating and non-exporting firms; conversely when the most capable supplier and final firms (innovators and exporters) are considered, no significant differences come out between their average TFP. Very similar results are found when the same investigation is performed on labour productivity. This evidence corroborates the GVCA intuition: the “supplier discount” holds for low-capabilities suppliers involved in captive or modular GVCs (Gereffi and al., 2005). Conversely, when high-capabilities suppliers participate in relational GVCs, their productivity is stimulated up to remove the gap with final firms.?

?In this paper, we analyze the trajectory of independent firms absorbed by a business group. Business groups traditionally buy high performance independent firms but do they also contribute to their growth after? We use an original data set built with two administrative files and a survey and we are able to follow firms 3 years before and 3 years after their acquisition by a business group. We use matching difference-in-differences estimators in order to check whether the employment and productivity in independent firms increase after their acquisition by a business group. Not surprisingly, our results first show that acquired firms are more productive than those which stay independent; second, they show that, after acquisition, employment and productivity increase faster for acquired firms.?

?The goal of this paper is to provide both a theoretical and an empirical contribution to the debate concerning the relationship between the financialization process of the economy and the organizational changes implemented by large multinational enterprises. ? Our hypothesis is that there is a tight connection between the two elements, and that the analysis of such connection provides key insights about how to critically interpret the development, in the last few decades, of managerial practices. In order to find support to our hypothesis, we performed an empirical research concerning several large multinational corporations – both some major Italian multinational companies, and some non-Italian multinational enterprises with large scale operations in Italy as well. Our main findings include (1) firms tend to abandon investments in areas where returns are expected to be uncertain and long term; (2) there is an increasing organizational relevance and power of CFOs and, in general; (3) mergers and acquisitions become both increasingly frequent, strategically relevant and organizationally problematic; (4) a strong focus on the reduction of labor costs, through various means, can also be seen as a way to materialize a short-term, financially oriented view of the firm; (5) a cognitive fragmentation of production seems to emerge, by which the firm is conceived as a “chain” of activities that can be separately assessed and managed according to a “shareholder value” orientation; (6) outsourcing practices are no longer explainable solely in terms of a traditional “core business” focalization strategy, but also in financial terms, as a way to gather resources to be used for short-term shareholder value optimization practices. The implications of these results are discussed in the paper.

‪This paper argues that the large changes in the extension of markets implied by globalisation call for a renewed analysis of production organisation and the filieres in which firms produce and sell products, in order to better understand structural changes in industries. ‪ After a review of structural changes, we briefly discuss some of the concepts and approaches existing in the literature to study production processes; of these, we consider the filière, global value chains and sectoral systems of innovation and production. All these approaches are useful to provide detailed analyses of the organisation of production within the firm and outside, with their networks of suppliers. However, they do not represent theories that could help predict in what circumstances certain specialisations or technological developments could be preferred. All approaches however appear to be complementary in deriving industrial policy implications. A deeper reflection on the way in which these approaches can be used to provide insights on structural changes appear therefore useful in order to derive precise industrial policy recommendations.