Capitalist crisis and the geography of the clothing industry

Abstract

Spanish

This article aims to analyse how the map of clothing manufacturing has changed since the 2008 financial crash. In doing so I look at global and intra-regional trade statistics before and after 2008. Here, I challenge the long-standing dominance of Global Commodity Chains and Global Value Chains approaches in debates about the geography of the clothing industry. These approaches fail to explain processes beyond regions and firms directly linked to global production networks, like the rise of ‘local sweatshops’ in large cities in core economies and the deindustrialisation caused by the globalisation of production in peripheral countries not linked to these networks. Here, global production networks are considered as one particular way of organising production, or, in Harvey’s terms, a ‘spatial fix’ coexisting with other spatial fixes developed by capital in response to the economic crisis of the 1970s. Rather inspired by recently reanimated debates on uneven development, I address changes in the map of clothing manufacturing by emphasising broader processes of capital accumulation and circulation. More specifically, I look at the effects of the capitalist crisis, the eastward shift in globalisation – evidenced primarily by the rise of Chinese economy – trade tensions, declining labour supply and rising labour costs across Southern and SE Asia on corporate spatial strategies. The emphasis on meso-level processes and connections, therefore, helps address politically important questions about possible future trajectories of garment manufacturing and supply in and beyond global production networks.

Keywords

capitalist crisis clothing industry uneven development global production networks spatial fix global commodity chains global value chains

Introduction

The geography of garment manufacturing has experienced numerous changes since the 2008 financial crash. In this article, I address these changes and interpret them as part of the responses of multinational corporations to the crisis and to the thorough transformations experienced by the process of globalisation that have followed in its wake.

Perhaps because it is ‘the most globalised industry of all’ (Bonacich and Appelbaum, 2000: 9), the clothing industry received critical attention in Global Commodity Chains (GCC) and Global Value Chains (GVC) approaches. The GCC/GVC literature has overwhelmingly dominated debates on the geography of garment production, greatly contributing to the understanding of power relations among actors in increasingly networked economies (Bair, 2005; Bair and Dussel Peters, 2006; Gereffi, 1994, 1999, 2013). However, by attempting to understand regional development through the detailed analyses of specific examples within GCC/GVCs, it has also contributed to the invisibility of other, non-global ways of organising economies. Furthermore, successful examples of participation in these global networks are emphasised in this literature (Bair and Werner, 2011a, 2011b; Fernández, 2017; Fridell and Walker, 2019; Selwyn, 2013), thereby neglecting the bad examples, the effects on regions excluded from global chains and the effects of the growing internationalisation of production onto smaller manufacturers supplying domestic markets.

In seeking to move beyond the GCC/GVC frameworks and to develop a more structural understanding of the global and regional dynamics of the clothing industry and their effects on firms, workers and regions, in this article, I propose a view of global production networks¹ as ‘spatial fixes’ (Harvey, 1981) coexisting with other spatial fixes and ways of organising and regulating economies around the world. The concept of spatial fix powerfully summarises explanations about what fuels spatial change in capitalism. Harvey developed this concept to highlight the importance of spatial expansion for the survival of capital. Spatial fixes are therefore a metaphor for capital's creation of ‘new territorial divisions of labour, new resource complexes and new regions as dynamic spaces for capital accumulation’ (Harvey, 2014: 154) in its perpetual search for overcoming its crises tendencies.

This article is inspired by recently reanimated debates on uneven geographical development that call for actively considering meso-level processes and connections, and developing nuanced characterisations of ‘the always-moving transnational configuration of (financialising and neoliberalising) global capitalism’ (Peck, 2016: 7). Here, I identify some of the broader dynamics of capital accumulation and circulation that structure particular ‘articulations of capital’ (Pickles and Smith, 2016) in different places and determine to a large extent the rise and fall of firms and regions. In doing so, I consider how the map of clothing manufacturing has changed since the 2008 financial crash, examining what have been the drivers of spatial change in this industry since then, and how corporate decisions have been influenced by processes such as capitalist crisis, declining supply of low-wage labour, technological change and the rise of China's economy as an illustration of an ‘eastward shift reinforced following the financial crisis of 2007/08’ (Hudson, 2016: 3). As Peck (2016: 7) points out, ‘assessments of which (national) economies are rising or falling, or doing something else altogether’ are ‘almost inescapable’ for practical and political reasons (see also Hudson, 2016).

Literature on the changing geography of global garment production in the last decade or so has emphasised the return of some manufacturing to peripheral countries located near the end markets of Europe and the United States. This move suggests the existence of a nearshoring trend – as opposed to offshoring to distant countries. As Pickles and Smith (2011, 2016) point out for the case of the EU, this tendency to manufacture garments in proximity to the end markets is motivated by the growing importance of rapid turnover times in fast-fashion segments. This trend is also highlighted by Dicken (2015), Lu (2018a; 2018b) and Gereffi et al. (2021b), who argue that nearshoring leads to more regionalised apparel trade, to the detriment of trade with distant markets. However, if we move beyond specific macroregions, statistical data paints a more complex picture.

The analysis presented here illustrates the tensions between the contradictory forces encouraging reshoring/nearshoring, on the one hand, and relocalisation in distant, lower-wage countries, on the other hand. The statistical data show that rather than a significant reshoring move, mounting competitive pressures have led to an accelerated striving for a reduction of labour costs in the last decade. The growth rate of imports from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar and Ethiopia to EU and North America illustrates this point. Understanding how these contradictory forces have played out is essential to identifying possible future trajectories of spatial change and their potential effects on regions, firms and workers in and beyond global production networks.

The article begins by emphasising the limitations of the GCC/GVC analyses, proposing to view these networks as particular spatial fixes that emerged at a specific period in the longer history of capitalist development. In the following section, I analyse how the garment corporations responded to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s, providing examples of what Harvey means by ‘spatial fix’. In this same section, I present the results of an extensive search and analysis of reports from industry organisations and specialised media that suggests that this industry is undergoing a crisis of overaccumulation that has thorough consequences for the geography of garment manufacturing. In ‘The geography of garment production after 2008’ section, I analyse the evolution of garment production and supply locations before and after 2008 through an analysis of trade statistics. Next, I address the tensions between the incentives to move production closer to the end markets to enable faster turnover times and the parallel need to keep costs down, and how fast fashion retailers have ‘fixed’ these tensions through the employment of migrant labour in sweatshop conditions in the big cities of the core countries. Finally, I argue that corporate decisions to shift manufacturing and supply locations have little potential to help relaunch capital accumulation in this industry in the current context of rising labour costs across Asia. Trade uncertainties, geoeconomic tensions between China and United States, growing geopolitical strains related to military confrontations in Ukraine and shifting end-markets make for a highly uncertain environment. The combination of uncertainty, declining labour supply, and forces encouraging nearshoring/reshoring entails unprecedented incentives to develop labour-saving technology in the sewing process. Identifying and describing these structural dynamics are essential to understand the real – and permanently evolving – potentialities and effects of foreign investments for regional development.

Global production networks as spatial fixes

GCC and GVC analyses have dominated debates on the geography of garment manufacturing for the past three decades. Together with contributions from Global Production Networks (GPN) theories, these approaches have been essential for the study of the growing importance of networked economies for the expansion of capitalism since the late 1970s. However, this literature faces two major limitations. Firstly, by approaching regional development through the analysis of a specific form of organisation of economies (i.e., global production networks), it does not provide tools to understand development beyond these, that is, in regions disconnected from global networks, or to consider other possibilities for regional development. Secondly, they largely ignore ‘the role of broader forces of uneven geographical development in shaping local possibilities’ (Sheppard, 2016: 11–12). In order to go beyond GCC, GVC and GPN analyses and open space for the study of other forms of organising economies; in this section, I suggest viewing global production networks as ‘spatial fixes’.

GVC approaches have been essential for understanding the inter-firm governance of garment value chains. In Gereffi’s (1994) distinction between buyer-driven and producer-driven networks, the apparel industry appears as a key example of the first type, that is, networks in which major global buyers have the ability to impose prices and conditions on a myriad of smaller suppliers that are geographically dispersed (Gereffi et al., 2005). The consolidation of giant global buyers was an important result of the growing offshore subcontracting adopted massively since the early 1980s (Abernathy et al., 1999). Meanwhile, GCC approaches have contributed to the analysis of processes of economic upgrading, namely, the ability of firms to achieve more stable positions in networks and capture more value by taking on higher value-added processes (Gereffi, 1999; Gereffi and Memedovic, 2003). Examples of upgrading in this industry have been analysed by Gereffi (2005) in Mexico, Tewari (2006) in India, Smith (2003) in Slovakia, Appelbaum (2008), Merk (2014) and Gereffi (2014) in China and Tokatli (2007) and Tokatli and Kızılgün (2004) in Turkey.

The hyper-visibility of garment production networks has contributed to creating a much damaging divide between production in global networks, on the one hand, and local manufacturing for domestic markets in both core and peripheral countries, on the other hand. This divide has contributed to the invisibility of the pervasive effects of the internationalisation of production on local manufacturers that supply domestic markets. Deindustrialisation in regions that are not linked to global production networks, but which are flooded with cheap imports have therefore received less attention. Studies on the rise of sweatshop economies in cities in the proximities of the markets since the 1980s, on their part, remain highly empirical and do little effort in connecting the rise of these economies with broader economic dynamics (Green, 1997; Mitter, 1985; Morokvasic, 1987; Morokvasic et al., 1986; Phizacklea, 1990; Rainnie, 1984; Ross, 2004).

The overwhelming dominance of the GCC/GVC approaches in the study of the geography of the garment industry has led to limited results in existing analyses of global and regional dynamics in this sector and their effects on firms, workers and regions. The first important limitation is related to the politics behind these research agendas. In this literature, regional development is analysed by taking global production networks for granted. Local possibilities of development are reduced to a variety of strategies to ‘capture the gains’.² According to Fernández (2017), GCC/GVC research is guided by the purpose of making policy recommendations on how to improve regional positionalities within value chains. Because of this motivation, these scholars tend to place the analytical starting point in the detailed description of actual examples with the aim of influencing future directions. This leads to a problematic take on the temporality of these processes: the effects that the arrival of foreign investments had on pre-existent conditions are ignored, while at the same time production networks appear beneficial and unavoidable, some sort of end of history for regions. Although GPN approaches advocate for a more dynamic approach (Yeung and Coe, 2015), the scope of the analysis is also here limited to the evolution of certain variables since the development of these networks.

Secondly, and as Bair and Werner (2011a) point out, by focusing on firms, regions and workers included in global production networks, and especially in successful cases of upgrading and/or ‘strategic coupling’ (Yeung, 2016), the GCC/GVC literature is marked by an ‘inclusionary bias’. Because of this bias, this body of research often neglects the effects of networks dynamics on those regions excluded from commodity chains, even in cases in which these regions ‘remain part and parcel of network formation and restructuring’ (Werner, 2019: 2). Rather, with a strong footing in uneven development Bair and Werner (2011a) and Werner and Bair (2019) advocate for a ‘disarticulations approach’ that pays attention to the continued presence of low value-added activities and processes of exclusion and downgrading as new ‘articulations of capital’ (Pickles and Smith, 2016) develop when foreign investments and orders arrive to (or leave) a certain region.

Thirdly, by focusing on the internal dynamics of value chains, GCC/GVC scholars assume the broader dynamics of uneven geographical development as static. The effects of broad structural processes on corporate decisions, such as changes in trade regimes, are at best studied in depth (see e.g., Gereffi et al. 2021a, on the effects of growing protectionism in global value chains), but the dynamics of crises and the geoeconomic tensions that trigger a change in trade regulations are ignored.

The latter limitation has been addressed in GPN approaches that seek to overcome the high empiricist research agendas of GCC/GVC. Contrary to the emphasis on sector-specific and intra-firm relations promoted in the latter, GPN scholars endorse a broader relational view that involves a wider set of actors and a focus on more structural dynamics. In this sense, in their call for the development of a GPN 2.0 framework that aims to ‘building a general theory of global production networks’, Yeung and Coe (2015) highlight structural competitive imperatives such as the need to adequately balance cost-investment decisions, the pressures to expand markets and the growing financialisation of non-financial firms as independent variables prompting actor-specific and geographically variegated strategic responses. Although the focus on these processes entails progress towards the development of better conceptual and theoretical tools, a further step is needed for identifying the causal mechanisms behind the spatial dynamics of production networks. Notably, questions like how corporate decisions are shaped by capitalist crises, the tendency for equalisation of the conditions of production and the parallel deployment of mechanisms to reproduce uneven spatial development (Smith, 1984) remain unattended. Furthermore, similarly to the previously mentioned limitation of GCC/GVC approaches, their findings are – spatially, historically and politically – constrained to regions and firms that participate in global production networks.

Conceptualising global production networks as spatial fixes contributes to overcoming these limitations. It accords with the call for a dynamic understanding of these networks made in debates on uneven development reanimated in the last decade (Peck, 2016: Werner, 2019). It serves the purpose of seeing them as a historical product in the longer history of capitalist development: a product developed by capital in response to its crises tendencies. The dynamic nature of global production networks is thus placed at the center of the analysis, because a key aspect of spatial fixes is their temporal nature: infrastructures and regulations created for enabling new territorial divisions of labour are created only to be destroyed and replaced by other sets of infrastructures and regulations at a later stage. Global production networks are a product of a specific stage and are prone to be deeply transformed when a different stage starts – usually, according to Marxist accounts, with a major crisis.

The key argument behind the concept of spatial fix is that capitalist crises trigger spatial change as individual capitalists and the institutions in charge of keeping capital circulation and accumulation flowing seek solutions to these crises. Two meanings of the term ‘fix’ are involved in the types of responses developed: emerging time-space configurations and territorial divisions of labour are enabled by fixing (or ‘tying up and pinning down’) capital in space through the building of infrastructures, and at the same time these investments provide a – temporary – solution to crises as they allow for the absorption of surplus capital for a long time (Harvey, 2018). If, as Harvey (2001: 28) puts it, ‘globalization in its present guise has entailed, among other things, the pursuit of a whole series of spatial fixes to the crisis that erupted around 1973’, then global production networks can be understood as one of these spatial fixes. They emerged and were consolidated after the capitalist crisis of the 1970s as a fundamental response to it and as a critical illustration of globalisation. They allowed companies in core countries to absorb surplus labour in peripheral countries by shifting manufacturing to low-wage countries ‘when conditions at home (were) unfavourable for further accumulation’ (Harvey, 2010: 205). The needs of multinational corporations became fixed in space as old ports in Hong Kong, San Francisco and Rotterdam were expanded, giant factories in China and Vietnam were settled, office spaces for multinational corporations multiplied in large cities in the US, UK and Singapore, new navigation lines were created and so on. As shown in the GPN literature, these moves were also accompanied by the introduction of new regulations and changes to existing ones – especially in relation to trade regulations.

If GCC/GVC approaches have dominated explanations about the changing geography of the garment industry during globalisation, below I intend to analyse post-2008 trends emphasising broader processes of uneven development such as the post-2008 capitalist crisis, the declining supply of cheap labour and the rise of the Chinese economy, and their effects on corporate decisions about manufacturing locations.

Capitalist crises and the clothing industry

The clothing industry provides conceptually and empirically rich examples of how capital responds to crises. This industry underwent thorough changes towards the late 1970s with the widespread adoption of offshoring as a response to the capitalist crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This crisis had significant impacts on the industry (see Mitter, 1985; Morokvasic, 1987; Morokvasic et al., 1986). Since the 1970s, companies have massively shut down their factories and adopted subcontracting arrangements, either abroad or locally. The employment of migrant labour in ‘local sweatshops’ (Montero Bressán and Arcos, 2017) became widespread across many cities in core economies, providing brands and retailers with flexibility and a way to reduce labour costs (see e.g., Mitter 1985, Rainnie 1984 and Morokvasic 1987 for London; Green 1997 for New York and Paris; and Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000 for Los Angeles). However, due to their limited scope – resulting from the fact that they were illegal – these economies could not offer a way out of the crisis. Rather, it was the massive adoption of offshoring that enabled a recovery in the industry. German, United States and Japanese brands and retailers were already adopting offshoring strategies since the 1960s (Dicken, 2015; Fröbel et al., 1980), and some European firms outsourced production to East and Central Europe since the early 1980s (Pickles and Smith, 2011). However, the figures show a sharp increase in the 1990s along with the progressive liberalisation of apparel trade, with United States moving production to Mexico since the start of North American Free Ttrade Agreement in January 1994. The real explosion of offshoring occurred at the turn of the millennium (Dicken, 2015; Smith, 2013) due to two main changes in apparel trade regulations: the dismantling – between 1995 and 2004 – of trade protections introduced in the early 1970s through the Multi-Fibre Agreement (henceforth MFA), and the incorporation of China into the WTO in 2001. According to UNCTAD (2013, quoted in Smith, 2013: 42), ‘[s]ince around 2000, global trade and [foreign direct investment] have both grown exponentially, significantly outpacing global GDP growth, reflecting the rapid expansion of international production in TNC-coordinated networks.’

The incorporation of millions of workers into the sphere of capital accumulation through market reforms in China –and Vietnam– in the mid-1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 were critical to the survival of capitalism during the crisis (Harvey, 2006; Hudson, 2001; Moody, 1997: Pickles and Smith, 2016). Therefore, trade liberalisation was adopted to allow Western companies to incorporate new masses of cheap and unorganised workers in East and Central Europe and China. This led to enormous savings in labour costs and, especially in the clothing industry, to price deflation which affected manufacturers in both core countries and peripheral countries which were not linked to global production networks. In terms of Harvey’s analysis, this amounted to a ‘spatial fix’ – or, rather, to several spatial fixes – to the crisis.

The evidence collected for this research suggests that the sector is once again going through a major crisis. Since the financial collapse of 2008, clothing production has been growing at a faster rate than consumption, due to the weak growth in demand in recent years and increasing competition from online retailers and new Asian firms operating either in the now more dynamic Asian markets (especially in China) or in Western countries. According to the report The State of Fashion, a flagship annual industry report by McKinsey and The Business of Fashion, today ‘it is more difficult to make a profit’ and ‘there is a lot of competition’ (Berg and Amed, 2020a). The remarkable growth of online sales by powerful new players (e.g., Amazon, Alibaba, Zalando, Zozo, Shein) increases competition (McRobbie, 2020), leading to ‘squeezing profits’ (Sourcing Journal, 2020). According to the secretary-general of the International Apparel Federation, Matthijs Crietee, ‘there is an enormous mismatch between demand and supply’, resulting in ‘price pressures caused by an enormous over-production’ (cited in Fabric2Fashion, 2020). Furthermore, if ‘34% of listed fashion businesses in North America and Europe were displaying signs of financial distress before the coronavirus first broke out’ (Berg and Amed, 2020b) store closure in all the major markets – and beyond – during lockdowns led to an unprecedented drop in consumption, reducing corporate profits by about 90% in 2020 (Berg and Amed, 2021). The massive stock surplus created by the disruption in consumption due to COVID-19 has only deepened a crisis of overproduction that was already in the making: according to Fabric2Fashion (2020), the industry’s overproduction ran, before COVID-19, at ‘30 to 40% each season’, whereas Berg and Amed (2020a) point out that ‘more than 20% of products end up in landfill, without ever being used’.

Trade statistics before and after 2008 show that in the face of this crisis companies have been rethinking their supply locations. The pressures driving these moves are numerous and encourage conflicting decisions about the location of manufacturing. On the one hand, shifting manufacturing to even lower-wage countries is imperative to offset rising labour costs in East and South East Asia. These would be coupled with the trend towards shifting end-markets, which motivates the permanence of production close to Asian markets.³ On the other hand, there are imperatives to bring production closer to the (Western) end-markets, encouraging the return of manufacturing to core countries (a process deemed as ‘reshoring’) or its location in their low-wage neighbouring countries (nearshoring). Quickly rising transportation costs and growing port congestion and sea traffic owing to increased trade during COVID-19 are one of these imperatives. A more important one is the widespread adoption of the strategy of accelerating the rate of turnover to curb low-profit margins, which requires manufacturing the clothes in proximity to the end-markets. The success of fast fashion retailers in the last decade or so illustrates this last point. Meanwhile, trade uncertainties since US–China trade tensions began in 2018 add uncertainty to managing far-flung and geographically dispersed supply chains. In the following sections, I analyse how these contradictory pressures have played out after 2008.

The geography of garment production after 2008

I would say we are in an environment of rewiring all of the supply chains.

(William Fung, chairman of Li & Fung, 2020)

Trade statistics before and after 2008 help us to examine how clothing corporations responded to the challenges posed by the capitalist crisis that followed the 2008 financial collapse. Understanding where garment manufacturing moving to is critical for assessing the potentialities of foreign investments for regional development. Although some industry associations and academics argue that speedy-delivery is today the key driver of geographical change in this industry, the analysis presented here suggests that corporate decisions after 2008 have been also governed by the search for ever cheaper labour, as illustrated in the growing participation of imports from distant, low-wage countries in the EU and United States.

The phasing out of the MFA between 1995 and December 2004 was a critical event for the geography of garment manufacturing. Along with China’s accession to the WTO in November 2001, it led to the large-scale transfer of manufacturing to Asia, and most specially to China. According to Appelbaum (2008), this contributed to the consolidation of giant Asian suppliers. They developed full-package services in their huge manufacturing hubs, mainly in the Pearl Delta region in China. When the MFA was finally ended in December 2004, the Asianization of garment manufacturing continued without noticeable change. However, trade statistics show important changes after the 2008 crash. The most important was the significant drop in the pace of international trade that followed the crash: while exports had increased by 71.3% in the five years prior to the crisis (2002–2007), they grew by 52.1% between 2009 and 2014. In fact, instead of a recovery over the years, from 2014 to 2018 world clothing exports grew by only 2.1%, while for 2020 and 2021, a sharp drop is expected due to the lockdowns adopted to combat COVID-19. According to Bair et al. (2021: 3) ‘the global financial crisis and subsequent economic slump marked the end of what had been a dramatic expansion of [Global Value Chains]’, a trend illustrated in international apparel trade figures (Chart 1).

Chart 1.

World exports of apparel (2002–2018) (in US$ millions). Source: WTO Data (2021).

Asia’s clothing exports, however, grew at a faster rate than world exports. Although China remained the undisputed top location for clothing manufacturing until 2014 – accounting for roughly a third of global exports – exports from other Asian countries accelerated after 2008 – especially those of Vietnam and Bangladesh.

Industry organisations such as the International Apparel Federation and the US Fashion Industry Association (USFIA), as well as specialised media (The State of Fashion, Sourcing Journal) and academics (Dicken, 2015; Lu, 2018a; Pickles and Smith, 2016) identify a trend of manufacturing returning to the peripheral countries around Europe and North America, borrowing the media term nearshoring – as opposed to offshoring. This trend would be illustrated by an increase in intra-regional trade in these two macroregions. In this sense, USFIA highlights the ‘growing importance of speed-to-market and flexibility’ which would mean that ‘the Western Hemisphere is becoming an indispensable sourcing base’ (Lu, 2018b: 10). Allegedly, ‘world textile and apparel trade is becoming more regional’ (Lu, 2018a) as companies seek to source from countries located in close proximity to end-markets (see also Dicken, 2015). As a result, intra-regional trade would be increasing in three main macroregions, namely South, South East and East Asia; the Americas; and Europe. Simultaneously, Asian exports would be losing significance in European and North American imports. However, post-2008 trade statistics show a more complex picture, with a timid reshoring in the EU but a growing share of made in Asia garments both in EU and North America.

Below I borrow this macroregional map to present historical statistical series that help us to understand how the geography of garment manufacturing has evolved over the last two decades, and how corporations are balancing the different variables that shape their decisions on supply location to accommodate a wider set of concurrent processes.

South, East and South East Asia

Existing statistics illustrate a process of shifting sourcing locations in Asia. The single most significant movement in garment supply location since 2008 is the progressive abandonment of China by major players since 2014. China’s export growth slowed sharply after the crisis, from 150% between 2002 and 2007 to 62.1% in the period 2009–2014 (WTO Data, 2021). As labour costs rose significantly, key players in the industry began to move away from it, leading to a sustained drop in Chinese exports since 2014. In the following five years, China’s share of world exports declined by 6.8% (from 38.7% in 2014 to 31.9% in 2018 [WTO, 2021]), falling below the pre-crisis level (Chart 2).

Chart 2.

Evolution of clothing exports by China (2000–2018) (in US$ millions). Source: WTO Data (2021).

Wages in China have risen significantly since the crisis years, due to a combination of a strong wave of worker organisation (Friedman, 2012; Kumar, 2019) and labour shortages (Kumar, 2019). According to Kumar (2019), the government’s strategy of increasing wages is an additional explanation for this trend of rising labour costs. The fact that real wage growth in publicly owned companies has been stronger than in private companies (ILO, 2016) could be an indicator of this. According to Friedman (2012), ‘by the end of the 2010 strike wave, Chinese media commentators were declaring that the era of low-wage labour had come to an end’. Real wages doubled between 2006 and 2013 (ILO, 2016), and although the growth rate slowed after the crisis, real wages continued to grow at 6.6% per annum in the last five years for which data is available (2013–2017) (ILO, 2018).

The rise in the share of Asian exports relative to world exports after the crisis was driven mainly by Bangladesh and Vietnam. By 2015, these two economies had overtaken Italy and Germany as the second and third leading exporters of clothing. These two economies were not affected by the drop in worldwide exports between 2014 and 2017. More recently, two other Asian countries have greatly increased their export growth rate: Cambodia and Myanmar. The latter has grown by more than 700% since 2009, especially after 2014 (WTO Data, 2021), suggesting that it has benefitted from the move away from China. In fact, the world’s top ten apparel importers have enormously increased their sourcing from these two countries in the last five to seven years (Chart 3).

Chart 3.

Evolution of clothing exports by selected Asian economies (2002–2018) (in US$ millions). Source: WTO Data (2021).

Chart 4.

Participation of selected regional blocks in total US apparel imports (2008-2018) (percentage). Source: WTO Data (2021).

Chart 5.

Participation of selected regional blocks in total Canadian apparel imports (2008 and 2018) (percentage). Source: WTO Data (2021).

These moves in Asia, and particularly the exit from China, are linked to decisions made by Western brands and retailers, as well as giant Asian suppliers. Eclat, a major Taiwanese supplier of garments for the likes of Nike and Adidas, shut down its last factory in China in December 2016, moving mainly to Vietnam and Cambodia (Kawase, 2018). When it announced its departure from China, its shares rose 2% (Ting-Fang, 2016). Similarly, Li & Fung, which according to Forbes (2018) is the world’s largest clothing supplier, is also diminishing its reliance on China (Kawase, 2018), while Fast Retailing (Uniqlo) has been progressively moving out of China since 2010 (Wortley, 2019). Similar moves can be seen in computer manufacturing, with multinational suppliers such as Delta Electronics, Pegatron and Quanta Computer reducing their production in China (Kawase, 2018). In sum, pressures similar to those that motivated the relocation of production from the West to Asia began to favour delocalisation from China towards the end of the 2010s (Sevastopulo, 2013).

This relocation of production within Asia suggests that companies are seeking to produce in lower-wage locations. While the minimum monthly wage in China is $330,⁴ in Bangladesh it is $95, in Vietnam between $130 and $190 (depending on the region), and in Cambodia $180. The fastest-growing exporter in the region, Myanmar, has the lowest minimum wage in Asia at $90.

Americas

The process of relocalisation of production to lower-wage countries seen within Asia can also be seen in the Americas, where Mexico has lost participation in total world exports as well as in US imports in favour of lower wage economies such as El Salvador, Nicaragua and, mostly, Haiti. While the average monthly salary for clothing workers in Mexico is $440 (INEGI, 2020)⁵, the minimum monthly salary in El Salvador is $295, in Nicaragua $166 and in Haiti $115 (Wage Indicator, 2022).

Speedy delivery might be gaining importance in some clothing items. Since 2008 there has been a rise in exports from all CAFTA-DR⁶ members to Canada and United States – except for Costa Rica and Dominican Republic. Haiti, for example, has more than doubled its exports to the United States since before the crisis. Industrial parks are being established in the poorest country in the Americas seeking to attract Dominican and Korean investors.

However, the rise of Haiti and other countries in the region has only partly compensated the sharp fall in Mexican exports to the United States since 2008. The participation of CAFTA-DR members plus Haiti and Mexico in United States and Canada’s imports has slightly fallen from its pre-crisis level: from 16.7% to 15.2% in United States, and from 5.9% to 5.8% in Canada. Conversely, the participation of the main Asian exporters⁷ increased in both countries (Charts 4 and 5).

In conclusion, much like in Asia, in the Americas clothing companies are seeking to supply their stores in lower-wage countries by moving out from Mexico and importing from cheaper labour countries across Central America and the Caribbean, as well as from low-wage countries in Asia. This poses a serious threat to Mexican regions still heavily dependent on clothing exports and suggests that growing investments in countries like Haiti are driven by the search for cheap labour.

Europe

In the European Union, intra-EU28 trade has increased since 2008, its participation growing from 46.9% in 2008 to 49.5% in 2018 in relation to extra-EU28 trade. The rise in exports from Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, the UK and others, all of which increased their share in total intra EU28 imports, could suggest that nearshoring, and perhaps reshoring too, are taking hold. Germany and the UK (the EU’s first and third largest importers) have more than doubled their imports from other EU28 countries since 2008. However, when nearshoring is taken as a sign of a growing regionalisation of clothing trade, to the detriment of imports from distant markets, the statistics present a more complex picture.

Trade analysis of six-digit figures shows that the countries of this macroregion have specialised in the production of higher value-added products for which speedy delivery and/or reliance are essential, such as jerseys and pullovers (of cotton, human-made fibres or wool), women’s and men’s trousers (of cotton or synthetic fibres), men’s shirts (of cotton) and women’s dresses (of synthetic fibres or cotton). The items that most increased their share of intra-EU28 imports between 2008 and 2018 are women’s and men’s trousers, and women’s dresses. During this period, the production of these items in EU28 countries may have been reshored or may have increased faster than imports from outside the EU28 (Tables 1 and 2).

Table 1.

EU28: main apparel products imported from EU28 countries (2018) (6-digit) (in thousands).

	Product	Euros
1	Jerseys and pullovers of cotton	3,861,205
2	Jerseys and pullovers of man-made fibres	3,742,781
3	Women's trousers of cotton	1,311,022
4	Women's trousers of synthetic fibres	1,150,736
5	Jerseys and pullovers of wool	1,087,926
6	Men's shirts of cotton	1,043,730
7	Babies garments of cotton	997,217
8	Women's dresses of synthetic fibres	885,480
9	Men's trousers of cotton	575,200
10	Women's dresses of cotton	550,984

source: Eurostat (2021).

Table 2.

EU28: apparel imports from EU28 countries. Fastest growing products between 2008 and 2018 (6-digit).

	6-digit product	Var. 2008/2018 (%)
1	Women's trousers of synthetic fibres	+5.01
2	Women's dresses of synthetic fibres	+4.72
3	Men's trousers of cotton	+4.61
4	Women's trousers of textile materials	+4.53
5	Men's trousers of synthetic fibres	+4.23

source: Eurostat (2021).

Despite the expansion of intra-EU28 clothing trade, imports from Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia have lost share over the period, slightly dragging down the share of imports into EU28 countries from the entire region (EU28 + Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia). In contrast, the share of imports from the main Asian exporters increased by almost 2%, with a strong prominence of low-wage countries: between 2008 and 2019, imports from Cambodia increased by 621% and from Myanmar by 1551% (Chart 6).

Chart 6.

Participation of selected regional blocks in total EU28 imports. 2008 and 2019 (percentage). Source: Eurostat (2021).

The noticeable signs of reshoring of fashion-sensitive clothing in the EU have not been strong enough to suggest that there has been a growing regionalisation of trade over the last decade. Instead, imports from Asia have increased their share of EU imports more than intra-regional imports. Meanwhile, Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia face a long-term decline in their share of EU imports, a trend that might influence sub-national regions heavily dependent on clothing exports to the EU.

The case of Ethiopia

The search for lower labour costs faces increasing minimum salaries in all the aforementioned Asian countries. From 2010 to early 2020, the minimum wage in Bangladesh and Vietnam grew by around 250%, in Cambodia, it more than tripled, and in Myanmar, it went from $70 in 2015 to $90 today (Wage indicator, 2022). The concerns raised by these trends are among the main reasons underpinning Ethiopia’s entry into the supply map of brands and retailers such as Inditex, H&M, Adidas, M&S, Primark, JC Penny, Tesco, Walmart, Levi’s Strauss and Hugo Boss (Chiwota, 2019). Since 2009, the largest economy in East Africa has more than tripled its exports each year (Chart 7).

Chart 7.

Evolution of clothing exports by Ethiopia (2004-2018) (in US$ millions). Source: WTO Data (2021).

With its proximity to Europe, a cheap labour force, cheap electricity, the potential to grow cotton, relative political stability, the development of large special economic zones and a foreign investor-friendly government, the largest economy in East Africa appears as the entry point of global garment supply chains in the region. The remarkable growth in its exports since 2009 can be explained mainly by the opportunity to employ workers for almost a third of the minimum wage in Bangladesh, at $37⁸ per month. However, Ethiopia still accounts for only about 0.02% of global apparel exports (WTO, 2021). Exposure to news stories about poor working conditions and low wages may explain why this production location still seems to be considered as a trial by Western corporations.

Lower labour costs vs speedy delivery: What are the prospects for regional development based in clothing exports around the world?

Despite claims by some scholars of a trend towards nearshoring and ‘increasing regionalisation of clothing trade’ (Dicken, 2015), the analysis of trade statistics presented above suggests that nearshoring, associated with the growing importance of speedy delivery, is limited to the EU and, within it, to certain garment items. In Asia and North America, the largest exporters in each region have lost share to countries with lower labour costs. In addition, low-wage Asian countries have increased their share of both EU and North American imports. Although the claims of growing nearshoring and/or reshoring would present opportunities for a recovery in employment figures in United States, the EU and/or their neighbouring peripheral countries, the increasing importance of low wages poses a limitation to these opportunities, while highlighting the potential of lower-wage countries such as Myanmar or Ethiopia to attract investment in the sector.

Fast fashion’s spatial fix

If, as virtually all reports on this industry point out, speedy delivery is becoming an important variable for most companies, it is because of the inclination towards fast fashion by a growing part of retailers. Fast fashion is a market segment based on accelerating the rate of turnover as a way of increasing profits. As the 2008 financial crisis affected fashion consumption, companies increasingly resorted to fast fashion. This trend has put further pressure on companies to strike a tight balance between proximity to markets and low costs. However, the incentives to bring production closer to end markets face the limits imposed by higher salaries.

A noticeable way in which companies have found this balance is illustrated by the rise of what Montero Bressán and Arcos (2017) call ‘local sweatshops’. In Prato (Ceccagno, 2017; Montero, 2011: RAI 1, 2007), Leicester (Hammer et al., 2015; Hammer and Plugor, 2019), Manchester (BBC News, 2009), Barcelona (El País, 2009), Los Angeles (The New York Times, 2019) and other cities, small and medium garment workshops employing migrant labour informally and paying below-legal salaries supply brands and retailers with the requirements of speedy delivery and cheap and constantly changing garments. The ‘Zara-model’ (Montero, 2011), now copied by more and more retailers (including certainly successful online retailers such as Boohoo in UK, which produces more than 50% of its low-cost garment in the UK [O’Connor, 2018], and Fashion Nova in California), is leading to a growth in local sweatshops in core and peripheral countries (Montero, 2011; Montero Bressán, 2021). ‘Governments’ tolerance towards this trend is a way of subsidising movements towards reshoring. Indeed, in the case of the UK, it could be argued that this support has recently been made explicit by ignoring the policy recommendations of a Parliamentary inquiry into the (un)sustainability of the fast fashion industry.⁹ Pressures to ease investment conditions for reshoring to take place are operating (Peck, 2017). However, the potential for relocation initiatives to enable these low-wage manufacturing centres to grow to the scale needed by the industry is limited. The return of manufacturing to the core or to its neighbouring countries could rather depend on the development and massive incorporation of labour-saving technologies.¹⁰

A context of uncertainty

The current responses of global clothing corporations to the state of capital dynamics and accumulation and to the geoeconomic shifts entailed by the rise of the Chinese economy are marked by uncertainty and volatility. Changes in the location of clothing manufacturing after 2008 are marked by tensions between reshoring/nearshoring imperatives, on the one hand, and the need to reduce labour costs, on the other. However, both alternatives seem to lack the potential to help the industry overcome the current crisis. The relocation of production within Asia may be helping companies cut costs, but salaries across the entire region are raising. As Anner (2019, 2020) shows, global buyers are putting increasing pressure on their suppliers and their workers in India and Bangladesh through a ‘price squeeze’ in order to avoid shouldering the costs of rising salaries.¹¹ However, the tendency towards ‘the equalization of levels and conditions of production’ inherent in capital (Smith, 2008 [1984], 6) seems to operate in Asia. The creation of new spatial inequalities becomes necessary to relaunch accumulation in new places, but no such options lie in the horizon. Although Ethiopia offers markedly lower salaries, its labour force is significantly smaller than that of Bangladesh, and even smaller than that of Vietnam alone¹². The same is true for its neighbouring countries. If in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the massive entry of millions of workers into the capitalist economy as a result of market reforms in China and the collapse of the Soviet Union helped capitalism recover from over a decade of economic stagnation, there are no similar opportunities to replicate the mechanism this time. As Harvey (2014, 108) argues,

from the standpoint of the long-term future of capital, it does seem as if we exist at a ‘last frontier’ for labour absorption throughout global capitalism. In the advanced capitalist countries there has been a massive movement of women into the labour force over the last fifty years and internationally there are few areas left (mainly in Africa and South and Inner Asia) where massive reserves of labour power are to be found. Nothing on the scale of the recent huge expansion of the global labour force will ever be possible again.

The ongoing geoeconomic tensions between United States and China, as the main sign of rising protectionist sentiments around the world, add volatility and uncertainty to an already troubled industry. In fact, before the COVID-19 crisis, industry reports such as the Sourcing Report, The State of Fashion and the US Fashion Industry Association’s annual report all agreed that trade uncertainties were the number one concern of global clothing corporations.

Another uncertainty shaping corporate responses to the crisis is what the future map of clothing consumption will look like. Although China became the largest market in 2019 and other economies in East and South Asia – as well as in the Gulf countries – are pointed at as the most dynamic markets, consumption in mature markets in core economies is sluggish (especially throughout the European Union, the UK and Japan). A process of shifting end-markets is taking place, and this too affects corporate decisions about manufacturing locations. This could lead to an even more complex manufacturing map, in which Western and Asian brands and retailers plan their sourcing maps not only on an efficiency-seeking basis but also on a market-seeking basis. According to Katz (personal communication, 2 September 2019) ‘it seems that companies are waiting to see how the tensions between US and China unfold’, not only in terms of the trade disputes but also in terms of the more structural fight for world hegemony. As Smith (2019) argues, ‘a protracted trade war would almost guarantee a global realignment… so global manufacturers would have to decide whether to pursue an America-centric or China-centric strategy.’ More recently the war in Ukraine – which is set to spread beyond this country and has virtually shut down Russia’s market for western companies – further hampers the ability of corporations to predict future developments.

Conclusions

In this article, I have identified the changes experienced in the geography of garment manufacturing since 2008. I have interpreted these changes as responses operated by global garment corporations to the challenges posed on them by the dynamics of capital accumulation and circulation since 2008. More specifically, I have analysed how the capitalist crisis, the rise of the Chinese economy, trade tensions and the declining supply of low-wage labour have influenced corporate decisions on manufacturing and supply locations.

Since its massive internationalisation in the late 20th century, the map of garment manufacturing has been changing rapidly. Moments of growth and euphoria in various regions were followed by upgrading in some places and exclusion and downgrading in others (Bair and Werner, 2011a). These changes have been overwhelmingly addressed from GCC/GVC approaches. However, the resulting knowledge is limited to cases of firms and regions directly connected to global production networks. Successful cases of upgrading have received most of the attention, whereas analyses on regions excluded from these and those not directly connected to global production, but strongly affected by it, are scarce.

Recently, reanimated debates on uneven geographical development can contribute to overcome some of the limitations of the existing literature. Following from this, I have addressed post-2008 shifts in the geography of the clothing industry considering both the call for a dynamic understanding of regional development, on the one hand, and the need to address the mutually constitutive connections between broader dynamics of uneven geographical development and the practices of place-based firms and regional actors, on the other hand.

Perhaps influenced by the empiricist bias of GCC/GVC approaches, existing analyses of current trends in clothing manufacturing location argue that proximity to end markets is the fundamental driver of spatial change in this industry. This would be leading to a more (macro-)regionalised map of garment trade, to the detriment of global trade. However, a focus on broader, meso-level processes and connections suggests that the incentives to move production closer to the end-markets conflict with equal, or even stronger incentives to reduce labour costs. At the same time, the latter faces a declining supply of low-paid labour in Asia. This combination of rising labour costs and mounting pressures to bring production closer to markets entails an unprecedented incentive to develop and incorporate labour-saving technology into the sewing process. It remains to be seen whether the companies that survive the current crisis resort to a technological rather than a spatial fix.

How the tensions between these conflicting imperatives will resolve depends on broader processes of overproduction, shifting end-markets, geoeconomic and trade tensions, labour supply and technological change, among others. Identifying all these processes entails a more politically insightful approach to the assessment of regional development possibilities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Maurizio Atzeni, Martín Schorr, Doris Lee, Kate Hardy and Steven Emery for their thorough comments on a draft of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article

Notes

Author Biography

Jerónimo Montero Bressán is researcher at Argentina's Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). He is based at the Escuela Interdisciplinaria de Altos Estudios Sociales, Universidad Nacional de San Martín (EIDAES/UNSAM). He received his PhD in Human Geography from Durham University. His research is focused on the changes in the geography of fashion production and consumption over the last 50 years, and their consequences on labor. He has worked at Argentina's Ministry of Labor and as consultant for the International Labour Organization and the Inter-American Development Bank. He also teaches methodology at the Master's course Global Studies Program (FLACSO) and economic geography at the Faculty of Economics, Universidad de Buenos Aires.

References

Abernathy

Dunlop

Hammond

, et al. (1999) A Stitch in Time: Lean Retailing and the Transformation of Manufacturing – Lessons From the Apparel and Textile Industries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Anner

(2019) Predatory purchasing practices in global apparel supply chains and the employment relations squeeze in the Indian garment export industry. International Labour Review 158(4): 705–727.

Anner

(2020) Squeezing workers’ rights in global supply chains: purchasing practices in the Bangladesh garment export sector in comparative perspective. Review of International Political Economy 27(2): 320–347.

Appelbaum

(2008) Giant transnational contractors in East Asia. Competition & Change 12(1): 69–87.

Bair

(2005) Global capitalism and commodity chains: looking back, going forward. Competition & Change 9(2): 153–180.

Bair

Dussel Peters

(2006) Global commodity chains and endogenous growth: export dynamism and development in Mexico and Honduras. World Development 34(2): 203–221.

Bair

Mahutga

Werner

, et al. (2021) Capitalist crisis in the “age of global value chains”. Environment and Planning A 53(6): 1253–1272.

Bair

Werner

(2011a) Commodity chains and the uneven geographies of global capitalism: a disarticulations perspective. Environment and Planning A 43(5): 988–997.

Bair

Werner

(2011b) The place of disarticulations: global commodity production in la Laguna, Mexico. Environment and Planning A 43(5): 998–1015.

10.

Berg

Amed

I (2020a)

Uncovering the state of fashion. McKinsey Podcast , 13 March.

11.

Berg

Amed

(2020b) The State of Fashion: Coronavirus Update. McKinsey and The Business of Fashion. Frankfurt and London.

12.

Berg

Amed

(2021) The State of Fashion 2021. Mc Kinsey and The Business of Fashion. Frankfurt and London.

13.

Bonacich

Appelbaum

(2000) Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry. Berkeley, CA: California University Press.

14.

Ceccagno

(2017) City Making & Global Labor Regimes. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

15.

Chiwota

(2019) Organizing in the garment and textile sector in Ethiopia. IndustryALL , 25 May. Available at: http://www.industriall-union.org/profile-organizing-in-the-garment-and-textile-sector-in-ethiopia (accessed 14 November 2018).

16.

Dicken

(2015) Global Shift, 7th ed. New York: Guilford.

17.

Fabric2Fashion (2020) Reboot – rebuild – rebound: fashion industry ready for resurrection? Youtube. 10 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBpuez-Ew7E (accessed 2 July 2020).

18.

Fernández

(2017) La trilogía del erizo zorro. Madrid: Anthropos.

19.

Forbes (2018) 2018 billionaires net worth: Victor Fung. 6 March. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/profile/victor-fung/#4c041ec734f3 (accessed 14 November 2019).

20.

Fridell

Walker

(2019) Social upgrading as market fantasy: the limits of Global Value Chain integration. Human Geography 12(2): 1–17.

21.

Friedman

(2012) China in revolt. Jacobin , 1 August Available at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/china-in-revolt/ (accessed 14 November 2019).

22.

Fröbel

Heinrichs

Kreye

(1980) The New international division of labour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

23.

Garrido Sotomayor

(2018) Etiopía-2018: aproximación sindical a su industria textil y del vestuario. Madrid: Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras.

24.

Gereffi

(1994) The organization of buyer-driven global commodity chains: how US retailers shape overseas production networks? In: Gereffi

Korzeniewicz

(eds) Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism. Westport: Praeger, 95–122.

25.

Gereffi

(1999) International trade and industrial upgrading in the apparel commodity chain. Journal of International Economics 48(1): 37–70.

26.

Gereffi

(2003) The Global Apparel Value Chain: What Prospects for Upgrading by Developing Countries. Sectoral studies. Vienna: United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

27.

Gereffi

(2005) Export-oriented growth and industrial upgrading: lessons from the Mexican apparel case – a case study of global value chains analysis. Available from the author.

28.

Gereffi

(2014) Global value chains in a post-Washington consensus world. Review of International Political Economy 21(1): 9–37.

29.

Gereffi

Buciuni

Canello

(2021b) Reshoring, GVC renationalization and local subcontracting networks. Regions in Recovery Global E-Festival , June 2021.

30.

Gereffi

Humphrey

Sturgeon

(2005) The governance of global value chains. Review of International Political Economy 12(1): 78–104.

31.

Gereffi

Lim

Lee

(2021a) Trade policies, firm strategies, and adaptive reconfigurations of global value chains. Journal of International Business Policy 4(4): 506–522.

32.

Gereffi

Memedovic

(2003) The Global Apparel Value Chain: What Prospects for Upgrading by Developing Countries. Vienna: United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

33.

Green

(1997) Ready-To-Wear and Ready-To-Work. London: Duke University Press.

34.

Hammer

Plugor

(2019) Disconnecting labour? The labour process in the UK fast fashion value chain. Work, Employment and Society 33(6): 913–928.

35.

Hammer

Plugor

Nolan

, et al. (2015) New industry on a skewed playing field: supply chain relations and working conditions in UK garment manufacturing. Centre for Sustainable Work and Employment Futures, University of Leicester.

36.

Harvey

(1981) The spatial fix – Hegel, Von Thunen, and Marx. Antipode 13(3): 1–12.

37.

Harvey

(2001) Globalization and the “spatial fix”. Geographische Revue 3(2): 23–30.

38.

Harvey

(2010) The Enigma of Capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

39.

Harvey

(2014) Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

40.

Harvey

(2016) Crisis theory and the falling rate of profit. In: Tubasat

(ed) The Great Financial Meltdown: Systemic, Conjunctural or Policy-Created? (pp. 37-54) Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

41.

Harvey

(2018) Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York: Oxford University Press.

42.

Hudson

(2001) Producing Places. New York: Guilford Press.

43.

Hudson

(2016) Rising powers and the drivers of uneven global development. Area Development and Policy 1(3): 279–294.

44.

Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (2020) Conociendo la industria: Textil y de la confección . Ciudad de México: INEGI.

45.

International Labour Organization (2016) Global wage report 2016/17 . Geneva: International Labour Office.

46.

International Labour Organization (2018) Global Wage Report 2018/19 . Geneva: International Labour Office.

47.

Kawase

(2018) How Asian companies are navigating the trade war. Nikkei Asian Review , 19 September. Available at: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Cover-Story/How-Asian-companies-are-navigating-the-trade-war (accessed 3 September 2018).

48.

Kumar

(2019) Oligopolistic suppliers, symbiotic value chains and workers’ bargaining power: labour contestation in South China at an ascendant global footwear firm. Global Networks 19(3): 394–422.

49.

(2018a) How regional supply chains are shaping world textile and apparel trade. Just-Style , November 23. Available at: https://www.just-style.com/analysis/how-regional-supply-chains-are-shaping-world-textile-and-apparel-trade_id135021.aspx.

50.

(2018b) 2018 Fashion industry benchmarking study . Washington D.C.: United States Fashion Industry Association.

51.

McRobbie

(2020) Fashion’s click and collect: a labour perspective. Verso Blog. Available at: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4566-fashion-s-click-and-collect-a-labour-perspective (accessed 16 February 2020).

52.

Merk

(2014) The rise of tier 1 firms in the global garment industry: challenges for labour rights advocates. Oxford Development Studies 42(2): 259–277.

53.

Mitter

(1985) Industrial restructuring and manufacturing homework: immigrant women in the UK clothing industry. Capital & Class 9(3): 37–80.

54.

Montero

(2011) Neoliberal fashion: The political economy of sweatshops in Europe and Latin America. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Durham. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3205

55.

Montero

Bressán J

(2021) From neoliberal fashion to new ways of clothing. Socialist Register 2021, 57, 201–217.

56.

Montero

Bressán J

Arcos

(2017) How do migrant workers respond to labour abuses in “local sweatshops”? Antipode 49(2): 437–454.

57.

Moody

(1997) Workers in a Lean World. London: Verso.

58.

Morokvasic

(1987) Immigrants in the Parisian garment industry. Work, Employment & Society 1(4): 441–462.

59.

Morokvasic

Phizacklea

Rudolph

(1986) Small firms and minority groups: contradictory trends in the French, German and British clothing industries. International Sociology 1(4): 397–419.

60.

O’Connor

(2018) Dark factories: labour exploitation in Britain’s garment industry. Financial Times , May 17. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/e427327e-5892-11e8-b8b2-d6ceb45fa9d0 (accessed 14 November 2018).

61.

Peck

(2016) Macroeconomic geographies. Area Development and Policy 1(3): 305–322.

62.

Peck

(2017) Offshore. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

63.

Phizacklea

(1990) Unpacking the Fashion Industry. London: Routledge.

64.

Pickles

Smith

(2011) Delocalization and persistence in the European clothing industry: the reconfiguration of trade and production networks. Regional Studies 45(2): 167–185.

65.

Pickles

Smith

(2016) Articulations of Capital: Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.

66.

Rainnie

(1984) Combined and uneven development in the clothing industry: the effects of competition on accumulation. Capital & Class 8(1): 141–156.

67.

Ross

(2004) Slaves to Fashion. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

68.

Selwyn

(2013) Social upgrading and labour in global production networks: a critique and an alternative conception. Competition & Change 17(1): 75–90.

69.

Sevastopulo

(2013) Shirt tales from TAL, an apparel powerhouse. Financial Times , 11 December. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/f31b2d54-60de-11e3-916e-00144feabdc0.

70.

Sheppard

(2016) Limits to Globalization: Disruptive Geographies of Capitalist Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

71.

Smith

(2003) Power relations, industrial clusters, and regional transformations: Pan-European integration and outward processing in the Slovak clothing industry. Economic Geography 79(1): 17–40.

72.

Smith

(2013) Imperialism in the 21st Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

73.

Smith

(2019) How this trade war will remake the world. Bloomberg , 23 May. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-23/u-s-china-trade-war-will-remake-the-world (accessed 7 April 2020).

74.

Smith

(2008 [1984]) Uneven Development. 3rd ed. London: University of Georgia Press.

75.

Sourcing Journal (2020) Sourcing report. Available at: https://sourcingjournal.com/report/sourcing-2020-report/ (accessed 3 March 2020).

76.

Tewari

(2006) Adjustment in India’s textile and apparel industry: reworking historical legacies in a post-MFA world. Environment and Planning A 38(12): 2325–2344.

77.

Ting-Fang

(2016) Taiwan's Eclat textile to exit China. Nikkei , December 8. Available at: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Taiwan-s-Eclat-Textile-to-exit-China (accessed 3 March 2020).

78.

Tokatli

(2007) Networks, firms and upgrading within the blue-jeans industry: evidence from Turkey. Global Networks 7(1): 51–68.

79.

Tokatli

Kızılgün

(2004) Upgrading in the global clothing industry: Mavi jeans and the transformation of a Turkish firm from full-package to brand-name manufacturing and retailing. Economic Geography 80(3): 221–240.

80.

Wage Indicator (2022) Minimum Wages per Country. Available at https://wageindicator.org (accessed 2 March 2022)

81.

Werner

(2019) Geographies of production I: global production and uneven development. Progress in Human Geography 43(5): 948–958.

82.

Werner

Bair

(2019) Global value chains and uneven development: a disarticulations perspective. In: Raj-Reichert

Ponte

Gereffi

(eds) Handbook on Global Value Chains (pp. 183-198). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

83.

Wortley

(2019) Japanese clothing firms reducing reliance on China. Just-Style , 3 July 2019. Available at: https://www.just-style.com/analysis/japanese-clothing-firms-reducing-reliance-on-china_id136517.aspx (accessed 4 June 2019).

84.

World Trade Organization (2021) WTO Data. Geneve. Available at: https://stats.wto.org (accessed 2 March 2022)

85.

Yeung

HWC

(2016) Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

86.

Yeung

HWC

Coe

(2015) Toward a dynamic theory of Global Production Networks. Economic Geography 91(1): 29–58.