Based on his recent monograph Interconnected Worlds (Stanford University Press, June 2022), this presentation offers some key observations on the co-evolutionary trajectories of electronics global production networks in semiconductors, personal computers, mobile handsets, and consumer electronics up to the late 2010s – a historical peak period in the global markets for these intermediate and end products just before the devastating impacts arising from the US-China trade war since mid-2018 and the Covid-19 pandemic since 2020. While some of these trends had been established ahead of the 2010s, their intensity and significance became more apparent during the 2010s. I then examine their most significant implications for the global economy in the post-pandemic 2020s: (1) greater significance of East Asia as a major end market, (2) pro-ecosystem approach to capability development, supply ecosystems, and market access, and (3) strategic partnership through global production networks as the organizational key to resilience building. I end with a discussion of three relevant future research agendas on technology, resilience, and politics for the geographical studies of global production networks and global value chains.
Tickets (Free) available here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interconnected-worlds-of-electronics-global-production-networks-post-covid-tickets-433445987617.
Professor Yeung has published 6 monographs and 1 textbook (3 editions), 7 edited books, 105 journal articles, and 50 book chapters. His most recent books are 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). As of September 2022, over 4,750 publications listed in the ISI Web of Science Core Collection databases cited his work (excluding self-citations; h-index = 37). Altogether, his work has been cited over 6,700 times by the same set of ISI WoS publications (23,815 citations on Google Scholar). He is among the top 20 most cited geographers in the November 2020 study 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.
