PRESS RELEASE

28 April 2008, Leeds, UK

Global garment trade reviewed

A special issue of journal Competition & Change, Volume 12 issue 1, The Global Apparel Chain after the MFA, analyses the situation of apparel exporters and garment workers in Mexico, sub-Saharan Africa, India, and China, after the phase-out of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA) trade agreement.

Since U.S. President John F. Kennedy's efforts to secure an international agreement regulating trade in cotton textiles in 1961, apparel production has been among the most protected manufacturing activities in the global economy. A seismic shift in this industry occurred on January 1, 2005, when the last quotas restricting the global garment trade were eliminated. The papers in this special issue address the implications of this historic change. They assess the impact of trade liberalization on developing-country firms and workers, underscoring similarities as well as differences across exporting regions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa in the post-MFA era.

The contributions to this collection demonstrate how regulatory shifts affect the governance structure of the textile and apparel commodity or value chain, how they shape development prospects in exporting countries, and how multilateral liberalization at the global level articulates with regional trade regimes. Some concerns include the result of the elimination of quotas on labour and working conditions, which could improve the situation of workers in huge factory complexes in countries such as China, but increases concern over 'sweatshops' and poor working conditions in countries where exports are declining. Papers also consider the increasing size and scale of transnational producers who may soon have the power to fight back against pressure from big buyers like Wal-Mart that use their size to drive down prices.

Contents include:

Ÿ Surveying the post-MFA landscape: what prospects for the global South post-quota?, 

      Jennifer Bair

Ÿ GCCs and development: a conceptual and empirical review, Enrique Dussel Peters

Ÿ Governance, entry barriers, upgrading: a re-interpretation of some GVC concepts from the experience of African clothing exports, Peter Gibbon

Ÿ Varieties of global integration: navigating institutional legacies and global networks in India's textile and apparel industry, Meenu Tewari

Ÿ Giant transnational contractors in East Asia: emergent trends in global supply chains, 

      Richard P. Appelbaum

Ÿ Use of global value chains by labor organizers, Katie Quan

The Guest Editorial, by Professor Jennifer Bair, Department of Sociology, Yale University, USA, is available to download free at www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/com/2008/00000012/00000001, where abstracts and table of contents can also be viewed.

Professor Bair highlights the importance of this special issue in assessing the situation: "The phase-out of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement in 2005 was widely expected to have profound consequences for the geography of textile and apparel manufacturing globally. This collection represents one of the first efforts to assess the consequences of this regulatory shift for garment workers and apparel manufacturers across the global South, both in countries such as China and India that are emerging as the big winners from the process of global restructuring, as well as in Latin America and Africa, where exporters are struggling to meet the challenges posed by liberalization." 
 

Competition & Change is a journal of global business and political economy. Of interest to social scientists both inside and outside of business and management, its international peer-reviewed articles develop understanding of the broad business issues around globalisation and financialisation. The journal welcomes submissions from international scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds including political economy, organisational sociology, international relations, and development studies. For more information please visit www.maney.co.uk/journals/cac 

Maney Publishing was established in 1900 and has offices in the UK in Leeds and London, and in Boston and Philadelphia in North America. With a collection of nearly eighty journals in materials science, humanities, and healthcare and biomedicine, Maney is committed to publishing high quality journals in print and electronic formats that are international in scope and peer-reviewed. Maney publishes extensively for learned societies, universities and professional bodies. Please visit www.maney.co.uk for more information.

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