Firms and economic development in the semi-periphery

Sonja Avlijaš and Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni

Chapter 22 in Handbook of Comparative Political Economy, 2025, pp 392-410 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter demonstrates how CPE concepts and methodological tools can be applied in innovative ways to shed light on the challenge of economic development in semi-peripheral places experiencing distinct combinations of economic opportunities and constraints. It highlights the contributions of several strands of CPE literature to the study of economic development in the semi-periphery, ranging from Varieties of Capitalism to Growth Models, the Regulation School, and literature on industrial districts and sectoral governance, and points out the questions they leave unanswered. It then introduces the concept of semi-peripherality as a framework for conducting grounded, comparative case study research on firms’ strategies to navigate the combinations of opportunities and constraints associated with semi-peripherality, and on ways macro-institutions, at the domestic and transnational levels, can facilitate those efforts. The chapter showcases a growing body of CPE scholarship focusing on strategies to overcome challenges related to disarticulation, dependency on foreign investment, industrial decline, and the digital transformation across various semi-peripheral geographies. Finally, the chapter emphasizes the importance of coordination among economic actors in addressing those challenges. Coordination-based approaches are often underappreciated in CPE scholarship on semi-peripheral contexts, as market and state institutionalist perspectives tend to dominate the discourse on economic development.

Keywords: Semi-periphery; Cross-regional comparisons; Firms; Innovation; Coordination; Place (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035327775
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