The Geographical Consequences of the End of Quota Constrained Trade in the Global Apparel Industry

2005年1月1日，纺织品和服装国际贸易自由化十年过渡计划完成，最终取消了主要市场的剩余配额。这结束了1974年在《多种纤维协定》下建立的贸易制度，该制度在30多年的时间里塑造了服装贸易的地理格局。该项目的重点是采购，生产和贸易发生在全球服装行业的地理位置，部分原因是由于这一配额逐步取消。该项目旨在了解新的生产和贸易模式以及新的经济治理形式如何应对贸易放松管制，这些新的机构和行业行为体如何互动，合作和竞争以塑造新兴的后配额贸易制度，以及技术，认知框架以及地理上特定的机构和代理人如何改变行业组织。除了采购和贸易地理位置的变化外，该项目还将调查寻求以各种方式重新规范供应链和贸易模式的新政策和做法，包括标准、守则、规范、合规监测以及实施保障措施的努力。该项目将记录过去十年中服装贸易在数量、方向和构成方面的主要变化，并确定服装采购和生产模式的决定因素以及这些决定因素是如何变化的。该项目将侧重于世界主要区域的关键产品部门，以提供工业结构调整的详细案例研究。特别是，该项目将调查导致承包商和生产商决定将生产从现有的生产中心转移到低要素成本地区的公司战略。该项目侧重于一个对世界许多地区的就业创造、区域发展和工业增长特别重要的行业，但该行业一直是空间移动的。它将有助于正在进行的关于贸易自由化和工业外包，去本地化和失业，供应链整合以及新兴生产经济地理的社会和政策辩论。它评估了不同的概念框架和科学方法在我们如何理解全球化和全球生产网络方面的效用。这项研究将加强对产业升级、劳动力质量和成本以及政策工具在特定区域管理就业增长或下降方面的作用的科学认识。该项目的结果还将有助于州、国家和国际机构更好地了解全球服装行业对《多种纤维协定》后配额取消的实际企业层面反应的范围，以及当地特定机构和行业参与者所发挥的作用。

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.