The political economy of local development in the semi-periphery
Special Issue
Our Special Issue in Studies in Comparative International Development (SCID), co-edited with Sonja Avlijaš and entitled “Firm-centred, multi-level approaches to overcoming semi-peripheral constraints” (2024), advances a research agenda for non-hegemonic knowledge exchange about economic development across the Global North and South centred around the concept of the semi-periphery. It seeks to complement the market and statist paradigms that dominate the development and industrial policy literatures with a coordination-based approach which, we believe, deserves a far more central place in our understanding of economic development than it currently has.
The Special Issue includes the following contributions:
Sonja Avlijaš and Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni, “Firm-Centered Approaches to Overcoming Semi-Peripheral Constraints”
Alessandra Cicci and Darius Ornston, “Semi-Peripheral Pathways to High-Technology Markets: How Organizational Origins Shape Entrepreneurial Ecosystems”
Angela Garcia Calvo, “Production Networks and Innovation in the Semi-periphery: The Transition to Electric Vehicles in South Korea and Spain”
Gerald A. McDermott and Belem Avendaño Ruiz, “Regulating to Exclude or to Enable: Institution Building and Transnational Standard Adoption in Mexican Food Safety”
Gergő Medve-Bálint, “From Rust to High-Tech Hubs: FDI-Led Upgrading of Urban Economies in East Central Europe”
Alen Toplišek, “Beyond Dependent Development? The Unlikely Emergence of an Upgrading Alliance in the Case of InoBat in Slovakia”
Caroline Arnold and Adnan Naseemullah, “Seeking Autonomy in the Semi-Periphery: Neomercantilism and Diversification in Turkey”
Our Special Issue took place at the LSE on 20 March 2023. You can find the agenda here
On 20 May 2022, we organised a first hybrid workshop on the political economy of local development in the semi-periphery at the Economics Faculty of the University of Belgrade. The workshop agenda can be accessed here.
Handbook chapter
We further build on the work that we started with our SCID Special Issue in a chapter entitled “Firms and economic development in the semi-periphery”, published in the Handbook of Comparative Political Economy edited by Marino Regini (Edward Elgar, 2025)
Special Issue launch event at Nuffield College, Oxford, 9 March 2026
Presentation of our Special Issue at the SASE annual conference in Limerick, 29 June 2024
Workshop at the Economics Faculty of the University of Belgrade, 20 May 2022