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

2005年1月1日，国际纺织品和服装贸易自由化十年过渡方案完成，最终取消了进入主要市场的剩余数量配额。这结束了1974年根据多纤维安排建立的贸易制度，该制度塑造了服装贸易30多年的地理位置。这个项目关注的是全球服装业的采购、生产和贸易的地理分布，部分原因是配额的逐步取消。该项目旨在了解如何针对贸易放松管制出现新的生产和贸易格局以及新的经济治理形式，这些新的机构和行业行为者如何互动、合作和竞争，以塑造新的后配额贸易制度，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该行业的组织。除了采购和贸易地域的变化外，该项目还将调查正在出现的新政策和做法，这些政策和做法寻求以各种方式重新监管供应链和贸易模式，包括标准、守则、规范、合规监测和实施保障措施的努力。该项目将记录过去十年服装贸易在数量、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如何变化。该项目将以世界主要地区的关键产品部门为重点，提供详细的产业结构调整案例研究。特别是，该项目将调查导致承包商和生产商决定是否将生产从现有生产中心转移到要素成本较低的地点的坚定战略。该项目关注的是一个对创造就业机会、区域发展和世界许多地区的工业增长特别重要的行业，但该行业在空间上一直是流动的。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、供应链整合以及生产的新兴经济地理位置的社会和政策辩论。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、劳动力素质和成本以及政策工具在管理特定区域范围内就业增减方面的作用的科学理解。该项目的结果还将帮助国家、国家和国际机构更好地了解全球服装业对后MFA配额取消的实际公司层面的反应范围，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.