Lecture organised by the Global production networks, trade and labour group
Based on his lead-authored chapter on semiconductors in Global Value Chain Development Report 2023 and his monograph Interconnected Worlds (Stanford University Press, June 2022), Professor Yeung’s presentation will offer some key empirical observations on the highly contested and politicized nature of semiconductor global production networks since the US-China trade war and the Covid-19 pandemic. In this capital-intensive manufacturing industry, governance and power dynamics are manifested differently from many other industries due to highly complex technology regimes, production network ecosystems, and, more recently, geopolitical imperatives. While some of these critical dynamics had been in play ahead of the 2020s, their intensity and significance became more apparent by the early 2020s. Professor Yeung will examine their most significant implications for macro-regional development in the post-pandemic 2020s and the need for strategic partnership with technology leaders towards building national and regional resilience. He will end with a discussion of some relevant future research agendas on technology, resilience, and politics for the interdisciplinary studies of global production networks and global value chains.
About the speaker:
Professor Henry Yeung has been Distinguished Professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, since 2018, and Professor of Economic Geography since 2005. As a leading academic expert in global production networks and the global economy, his research interests cover broadly theories and the geography of transnational corporations, East Asian firms, and developmental states. He is the first geographer based in Asia to receive both the 2018 American Association of Geographers Distinguished Scholarship Honors (“in recognition of his extraordinary scholarship and leadership in the discipline”) and the UK’s Royal Geographical Society Murchison Award 2017 (for “pioneering publications in the field of globalisation”). In November 2022, he was conferred the 2022 Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Field by the Regional Studies Association in London: “acknowledging and celebrating excellence in the field of regional studies”. Professor Yeung has published 7 monographs and 1 textbook (3 editions), 7 edited books, 110 journal articles, and 50 book chapters. His most recent books are Theory and Explanation in Geography (RGS-IBG Book Series, Wiley, September 2023), Interconnected Worlds: Global Electronics and Production Networks in East Asia (Innovation and Technology in the World Economy Series, Stanford University Press, June 2022), Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy (Cornell Studies in Political Economy Series, Cornell University Press, 2016), and Global Production Networks: Theorizing Economic Development in an Interconnected World (with Neil Coe, Oxford University Press, 2015).
Professor Yeung’s views on global production networks and East Asian development have been quoted in The Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes Asia, South China Morning Post, and others. He has also served as an expert consultant contributor to World Investment Report and ASEAN Investment Report (UNCTAD), Global Value Chain Development Report (WTO/ADB), and others. As of July 2023, over 4,850 publications listed in the ISI Web of Science Core Collection databases cited his work (excluding self-citations; h-index = 38). Altogether, his work has been cited over 7,000 times by the same set of ISI WoS publications (25,200 citations on Google Scholar). He is ranked 13th among 15,090 authors in the field of Geography and 8,646th among all 195,605 top scientists in the Sept 2022 updated of top 2% of world scientists, led by Stanford’s John Ioannidis, in 22 scientific fields and 176 sub-fields. For two decades since 2001, Professor Yeung has been editor of two top journals in Geography – Economic Geography and Environment and Planning A. He is also past editor of Review of International Political Economy (2004-2013) and serves on the editorial boards of 19 other journals.
