干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Inward investment has been accorded a central role in the internationalization and restructuring of East-Central European economies. This paper undertakes a critical examination of the capacity of inward investment projects in the Czech and Slovak Republics to generate forms of embedded regional restructuring. The analysis points to the profound, yet uneven and contradictory regional transformations resulting from inward investment in three industrial sectors in the Czech Republic and Slovakia: automobile manufacturing; light engineering; and tobacco and food processing. The paper also develops a number of conceptual arguments around the determinants of integrated and embedded inward investment. We draw upon two forms of regional restructuring to analyse how and why differential forms of embeddedness develop: 'defensive restructuring' through a focus on low wage, cost advantages and large-scale worker flexibility; and 'offensive restructuring' in which there is a conservation and enrichment of skills, connected to high wages, an upgrading of productivity and important levels of co-operation and partnership between economic and institutional actors. We identify two main forms of transformation from an analysis of case study firms. First, we argue that forms of path dependent embeddedness are apparent when building upon former industrial strengths and traditions by an investor occurs, rather than their marginalization. In other words, where path dependent transformations of networks occurs, inward investment tends to have a more dynamic impact upon a region and does not result in the truncated industrialization of isolated FDI plants. We also argue that such forms of embeddedness are not without their significant costs and contradictions, and while local supply linkages may be thickly developed, contradictory wage relations and labour market impacts of these investments are also significant. Second, we identify the dominance of disembedded plants similar to 'cathedrals in the desert' where former linkages and networks (while important in establishing the joint venture) have been truncated and replaced by internationalized systems of supply integration. Therefore, where supply embeddedness exists this has not been on the basis of networks that have been created de novo from a vacuum, but recreated on the terms of foreign capital through a transformation of those systems of integration that already existed under state socialism. Our analysis suggests that the kind of institutional depth that some observers have argued is necessary to overcome regional peripherality in an enlarged Europe is confined to very few foreign investment projects and largely limited to the development of supplier relations. Deeper forms of embedded institutional development therefore seem largely to be absent and the enrichment of skills, increasing wages and productivity and high levels of co-operation and partnership, which have been identified as key components of an offensive strategy for regional restructuring, are largely absent.