This paper presents and discusses two case studies in the Portuguese motor vehicle industry – Salvador Caetano’s Ovar Industrial Division (SCOID), a ‘Brownfield site’ with minority Toyota ownership; and Autoeuropa, a ‘Greenfield site’ wholly owned by Volkswagen. Basically, it...

The Paraná State, one of the fastest growing states in the Brazilian economy, has gone through a lot of structural changes in the last two decades. In this time period, the primary sector activities lost in importance to the secondary and the tertiary sectors. In this process of going from an...

The paper presents findings of a large study on socio-economic impacts of the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster on the Japanese agriculture and food sector. It contains fourteen parts: introduction with the framework of analysis; a brief description of events and...

The food industry has been seen as one of the most successful sectors in Bulgaria with potential to growth. At the same time agriculture and food industry have had large negative effect on the environment. For reduction of the potential harmful environmental impact caused by agricultural and...

The March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant accident have had immense impacts on Japanese agri-food sector. Previous analysis has demonstrated that some of the impacts that triple disaster are difficult to identify and assess due to the insufficient information, controversial data,...

In this paper, we examine the structure and the evolution of international exchanges of auto parts over the 2000-2012 period for four European countries. The first part of our study reviews the literature and points out four stylized facts about the geography of automotive supply networks. In...

With increasing globalization, the intense competition and customer-pressure have spurred many producers from developing/ emerging countries to adopt the best management and organizational practices. The quality issues are paramount for automotive manufacturing. The multiplicity of Quality...

This paper aims to carry out an analysis of fuzzy clusters in the Brazilian automotive industry to contribute to the analysis of the relative importance of these economic activities in the national productive structure and in their regional contexts. The intention is to assess whether, once they...

The NAFTA and MERCOSUR agreements seem to have accelerated the regional integration process respectively within North and South of America. In the South in particular, MERCOSUR has led to trade liberalisation and deregulation, which has resulted in significant growth of its regional trade. In...