Globalisation and Services-driven Economic Growth ― Perspectives from the Global North and South

Following drastic shifts in the spatial organization of the production of goods, increasingly fierce competition now forces firms also to look critically at how the production of services is organized. Digitization and advances in information and communication technologies have enabled firms to unbundle service business processes, and the increased global availability of sufficiently skilled labour allows for the relocation of ever more of these processes around the world. As a result, a new geography of services production is taking shape: a geography that is defined by new interregional and international divisions of labour and held together by increasingly complex global services production networks. This book aims at understanding how the global reorganisation of services production alters the relation and creates new interdependencies between the global North and the global South. It examines how the unbundling and relocation of services production fosters economic development and service-sector driven modernisation processes in new locations in the global South, and explores how the same processes can contribute to economic recovery in crisis-hit areas in the global North.

Dr. Niels Beerepoot is senior lecturer in Economic Geography at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Dr. Bart Lambregts is post-doc researcher at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research of the University of Amsterdam and lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture of Kasetsart University in Bangkok. Jana Kleibert, MSc, is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Dr. Robert Kloosterman is professor in Economic Geography at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam.