On January 1, 2005 the ten year transitional program for liberalizing international trade in textiles and clothing was completed with the final removal of remaining quantitative quotas into major markets. This brought to an end a trade regime established in 1974 under the Multi-Fiber Arrangement that had shaped the geographies of clothing trade for over thirty years. This project focuses on the geographies of sourcing, production, and trade occurring in the global apparel industry resulting, in part, from this quota phase out. The project seeks to understand how new patterns of production and trade and new forms of economic governance are emerging in response to trade deregulation, how these new institutional and industrial actors interact, cooperate, and compete to shape the emerging post-quota trade regime, and how technology, cognitive frameworks, as well as geographically specific institutions and agents, are transforming the organization of the industry. Besides changes in the geographies of sourcing and trade, the project will investigate the new policies and practices emerging that seek to re-regulate supply chains and trade patterns in various ways, including standards, codes, norms, compliance monitoring, and efforts to impose safeguard measures. The project will document the major changes in the volume, direction, and composition of trade in apparel in the past decade and identify the determinants of the patterns of apparel sourcing and production and how these determinants have changed. The project will focus on key product sectors in major regions of the world to provide detailed case studies of industrial restructuring. In particular, the project will investigate the firm strategies that led to decisions of contractors and producers to relocate or not to relocate production away from existing centers of production to lower-factor cost locations.
The project focuses on an industry that has been particularly important for job creation, regional development, and industrial growth in many parts of the world, but which has always been spatially mobile. It will contribute to on-going social and policy debates about trade liberalization and industrial outsourcing, de-localization and job loss, supply chain consolidation, and the emerging economic geographies of production. It assesses the utility of differing conceptual frameworks and scientific methodologies in how we understand globalization and global production networks. The research will enhance scientific understanding of the role of industrial upgrading, workforce quality and costs, and policy instruments in managing employment growth or decline in specific regional contexts. Results from the project will also help state, national, and international agencies better understand the range of actual firm-level responses to post-MFA quota removal that are occurring in the global apparel industry and the roles played by locally specific institutional and industry actors.
