The project explores the links between Global Investment Flows, Foreign Investment, Global Value Chains (GVCs) and Local Development across the globe.
A complex flow of investment is spreading across the globe connecting more and more places. These flows bundle together streams of capital, skills and knowledge, the key factors in determining the development and wealth of places around the world. As a result, it is now impossible to understand economic opportunities, innovation and development without one central concept – CONNECTIVITY.
However, investment flows are highly selective and, as a result, many parts of the world are left behind. Even within countries that receive huge amounts of foreign investment, the patterns of distribution are highly unequal. In rapidly growing economies, there are still many places that feel stagnant or even in decline.
National and regional governments try all sorts of ways to attract foreign investments – offering unique tax breaks, building roads and railway lines, making it easier to hire and fire, investing in education. But they’ve been doing so, often without a serious evidence base on which to base their decisions.
That’s where this project comes in, studying what makes multinational firms tick (or not) in regions and cities across the globe and exploring how prosperous, innovative, successful regions – hubs of this enormous global flows of investment – can co-exist with places that are completely left behind. Left behind places are lending themselves increasingly more to the forces of populism and a political dis-integration. Understanding how these places can actually benefit from connectivity is paramount importance for our societies in Europe and beyond.
With eleven peer-reviewed articles already published, a book in press and nine more papers at various stages of the peer-review process, the MASSIVE project has offered answers to research questions organised in three key pillars
- Location: How and where is connectivity built? Where are hubs of capital, innovation and ideas clustering and why? What it is that gives one part of the world, one country, one city the magnetism that their neighbours lack? How strategic assets – technology, ideas and the tacit knowledge unique to certain places – are highly localised and also the key factors that investors look for.
- Impact: how investments flows are embedded or not in their host region. Is it really a given that more firms will make things better for the local economy? What types of companies will help and which will hinder? And what happens to the local economy when domestic firms invest abroad?
- Policy: how connectivity can be re-shaped by public policies. This section of the project offers hard evidence to policymakers on the questions where guesswork has driven decisions for too long – what works in practice to attract and embed foreign companies into the local economy? Where? Under what conditions? Are new investments attracted by means of public policies beneficial to the local economy or not?
The communication and dissemination channel for the results from this ERC project is the LSE Blog ‘Global Investments Local Development’:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gild/(opens in new window)
