Sören Scholvin

• Professor at Universidad Católica del Norte (Chile)

Many developing countries seek to participate in the emerging global green hydrogen industry, not only as exporters of green hydrogen and its derivatives to Europe and the Far East, but also to use it for their own energy security and green transition. They hope that new development paths will lead to latecomer industrialisation. This article asses...

Proponents of green hydrogen projects argue that investment in this new industry has to be ‘de-risked’ to overcome industry-specific uncertainties and other challenges typical to developing countries. However, some scholars have warned against de-risking strategies because of the financial burden as well as broader economic and political dependenci...

Cities in resource peripheries tend to be unattractive places. They lack the features that appeal to the knowledge elite – at least from the perspective of Richard Florida’s influential work – and, therefore, face challenges to diversify their economy. The article deals with Antofagasta, which is the capital of one of the world’s most important min...

Development corridors have become a key tool of economic policy in the Global South. Yet, it appears that many of these mega-projects already fail at the stage of implementation. The article deals with three problems that corridors face. Corresponding ideas are drawn from existing literature, and confirmed and expanded against the backdrop of a cas...

Green hydrogen is widely recognized as a promising solution for reconciling economic growth with environmental sustainability. It holds significant potential for decarbonizing hard-to-abate sectors, such as steel and chemicals, and for fostering industrial development, job creation, and technological learning. However, the pathways through which em...

La industria de hidrógeno verde está marcada por una dinámica sin precedentes, lo que implica oportunidades para unos países del Sur global, incluyendo Chile. Considerando los bajos costos de la energía fotovoltaica, la región de Antofagasta podría convertirse en un nodo de la nueva industria. El artículo analiza si la futura producción de hidrógen...

Green hydrogen may play a major role in the global energy transition. It moreover offers prospects for industrial development in Southern nations that benefit from natural conditions favourable for the required energy inputs from solar and wind power. Yet, green hydrogen projects need to be de-risked to overcome industry-specific uncertainties and...

Los corredores de desarrollo tienen por objetivo vincular las regiones periféricas con la economía global. Son diversos en cuanto a su complejidad, pero siempre se basan en la mejora de la infraestructura de transporte. El artículo analiza las perspectivas de los proveedores de servicios de transporte en Antofagasta de internacionalizarse a través...

The green hydrogen industry will grow tremendously in the coming decades. Peripheral regions in the Global South that offer favourable natural conditions for renewable energies are expected to become nodes of emerging global value chains. This has led to high expectations with regard to development impulses. The paper assesses the prospects of link...

Recent contributions to the global production networks (GPN) literature delve into public governance as mediation between global networks and regional assets. They deal with the state as a buyer, producer and regulator. Further developing this line of research, the present article goes beyond inter-scalar mediation, explaining how Chile’s National...

Casi 45 millones de personas trabajan en la pequeña minería alrededor del mundo, la gran mayoría de manera informal y en regiones muy periféricas. Este artículo analiza la formalización del sector en Chile por la Empresa Nacional de Minería (ENAMI). Con base en 19 entrevistas semiestructuradas e información de fuentes secundarias, se explica que EN...

Trade in services has grown more rapidly than trade in manufactured goods in recent decades. Countries from the Global South are chiefly responsible for this shift. The research note draws attention to service investment that originates in Southern economies and is directed at markets of the same (sub)continent. Such dynamics have been neglected by...

Spaces of global production comprise a diverse set of spatial figures that result from and support a global division of labour. The proliferation of spatial figures in scholarly work on global production in economic geography and beyond maps a conceptual landscape. The network , the agglomeration , the frontier, the plantation, the gateway , the co...

This article explains how ENAMI, the Chilean National Mining Company (ENAMI), has legalized and formalized artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). The experience reveals how promoting formalization strategies that provide much broader support for ASM, beyond mining licenses and tenure rights (i.e., legalization), defined as formalization (e.g., geo...

Cities engage in branding to present themselves as attractive locations. Some seek to gain recognition as world cities this way. The article identifies liveable environments with inclusive societies, events/mega-events, and iconic architecture as key components of such strategies. These thoughts are applied to Cape Town and Johannesburg. The former...

La literatura sobre las ciudades globales en la tradición de la red de investigación “Globalization and World Cities” carece de estudios del atractivo de unos lugares para la élite global del conocimiento y las compañías transnacionales. Para entender mejor este fenómeno, el presente artículo adopta la perspectiva del “place branding”. El autor ide...

'The economics of climate change in Argentina', edited by María Belfiori & Mariano Rabassa. Springer, 2021

The article invites readers to rethink cities in economic networks against the backdrop of the many ways in which ‘gateway cities’, serving as brokers, interlink their respective hinterlands globally. It adds logistics, industrial processing and knowledge transmission to the more established gateway dimensions of corporate control and related servi...

There is growing scepticism about global value chains because of their association with an unequal global trading system. Regionally coordinated and integrated production in Asia appears to have served as a better mechanism for promoting economic prosperity than direct integration into global markets. This is founded upon regional cooperation on in...

For the World Bank, integration into the global economy is the path towards development. Its experts argue that the Global South will benefit from easing barriers to investment and trade, thus facilitating interaction between transnational corporations and local enterprises. Yet, there is growing scepticism regarding the prospects to develop in glo...

Participation in global value chains seemingly offers prospects for resource peripheries to achieve linkage-based diversification through strategies of ‘thinning’ and ‘thickening’. The viewpoint presents insights from field research on the oil and gas sector in Argentina, Bolivia, Ghana and Namibia. Each case study reveals a particular challenge: d...

Research on global production networks (GPNs) has been criticised for its 'inclusionary bias'. The mainstream is focussed on successful development, paying little attention to firms and regions that do not perform well and thus neglecting that the success of some may be tied to the failure of others. This chapter makes a contribution to overcoming...

En estudios recientes sobre Singapur, se propone que las “ciudades compuertas” conectan lugares periféricos a las redes globales de producción y tienen un impacto importante sobre el desarrollo de la periferia. Enfocando el sector de petróleo y gas, el presente artículo revela las múltiples formas en que las ciudades sirven como centros de globaliz...

The World Bank encourages integration into the global economy as the path towards development. However, the performance of resource peripheries has remained unsatisfactory, also because numerous economic activities are concentrated in 'gateways' – that is, cities that interlink other places globally. Gateways appear to prosper at the expense of per...

Development corridors bring transport infrastructure together with regulatory reforms and other measures to produce regions that are functional in the sense that they can plug into global value chains. They promise regional development by ‘getting the territory right’. Yet, numerous studies show that the outcomes are mixed. Some corridors are marke...

Este artículo analiza las perspectivas del desarrollo regional a través del sector petrolero en Bolivia. Se aplica el enfoque de las redes globales de producción y se estudian tres procesos de “desarticulaciones”. Mientras que algunas empresas en la ciudad de Santa Cruz se benefician de la integración en el sector petrolero, la economía regional se...

Gateway cities connect vast hinterlands to the outside world, being vital for our highly globalised and networked society. Studying them complements the understanding of urban nodes in global networks from the world city literature because it draws attention to the diversity of these nodes and city-to-hinterland relations. This article first discus...

El artículo analiza el rol de Buenos Aires como "ciudad compuerta" en el sector petrolero, especialmente su impacto sobre el desarrollo en el interior de Argentina. En él se combinan dos enfoques, uno de geografía económica y otro de geografía urbana: redes de producción y ciudades globales. El autor propone considerar cinco elementos que caracteri...

Namibia is an oil and gas frontier state. Expectations of a coming boom with ensuing positive effects for the entire economy are high. The author assesses the prospects of the Namibian oil and gas sector, drawing on the concept of ‘linkages’. Because the corresponding literature neglects political challenges, the author complements the linkage conc...

The on-going COVID-19 crisis demonstrates how interlinked and networked our globalized society has become. It is not surprising that the world economy is increasingly studied through a network lens. In economic geography, the predominant approaches in this regard are global production networks (GPNs) and world city networks (WCNs). These have gener...

The World Bank, World Trade Organization and others promote integration into global markets as a certain path towards economic development. Some researchers share this optimism, arguing that development is the record of how one thing leads to another, once peripheral locations have plugged into global networks. Comparing resource peripheries in Sou...

The research note assesses the prospects of development through extractive industries in north Patagonia (Argentina), a region that holds considerably large unconventional oil and gas deposits. The author applies the linkage approach from the literature on global value chains, paying particular attention to backward and forward production linkages...

Brazil has been labeled an anchor country, a leading area, and a regional power. Yet, even before the crisis triggered by Operation 'Car Wash' began, several scholars had called into question Brazil's driving role in regional integration, stressing political challenges and economic weaknesses that hindered closer relationships among the South Ameri...

Serving as “gateways”, some world cities tie their wider hinterlands to global networks. The article revisits gateway–hinterland relations against the backdrop of assessments that lead to opposed conclusions on the benefits and shortcomings of integration into the world economy. Referring to the oil and gas sector in Argentina and Ghana, it answers...

The World Bank promotes integration into global value chains as the path towards development. By liberalising their respective national economies, African countries are expected to benefit from economic impulses, with more and more activities beyond resource extraction being relocated to peripheral locations and generating so-called linkages there....

Além de fomentar o aumento do comércio entre países, a globalização tem mudado significativamente os processos econômicos ao possibilitar que as empresas dividam as cadeias de produção e comercialização em vários segmentos, que se espalham por todo o mundo. Nesse sentido, as redes de produção globais (RPGs), fragmentadas organizacionalmente e disp...

The periphery of the worldeconomy is integrated into global production networks (GPNs) by ‘gateways’. These are intermediary places from where transnational corporations organise their business activities in close cooperation with corporate service providers. Gateways may also serve as logistics nodes as well assites of industrial processing and kn...

This chapter provides an overview of three concepts that have been widely applied in Economic Geography to explain uneven development against the backdrop of increasingly fragmented global production. Global commodity chains (GCCs) have their roots in world-systems analysis. They serve as an analytical tool to uncover core–periphery relations. Glob...

En este artículo, se analizan las perspectivas del desarrollo industrial en las redes globales de producción (RGP) del sector petrolero en la cuenca neuquina. El autor postula que la forma de la integración en las RGP y el capital humano son claves. Configurados de una manera favorable, permiten la transición hacia la economía del conocimiento. Com...

World cites are critical nodes in global production networks (GPNs). Being ‘gateways’, they serve as hubs for transport and logistics, industrial processing, corporate control and service provision as well as knowledge transmission. In this article, the concept of gateway cities is applied to Buenos Aires and the oil and gas sector. The author expl...

Research that stands in the tradition of the world city literature has made essential contributions to our understanding of ‘gateways’. Being logistics and transport hubs, sites of industrial processing, places of corporate control and service provision as well as locations of knowledge generation, gateways are an intermediate step between the peri...

Cites are vital for value chains. Serving as ‘gateways’, they interlink hinterland locations. Based on data from secondary sources and extensive interviews, the article explains how Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg play essential roles for several firms involved in the oil and gas sector, being logistics hubs, sites of industrial processing, loca...

Cidades globais e redes de produção globais (RPG), abordagens analíticas fundamentais na Geografia Econômica, são aspectos definidores da economia global atual. Os conceitos de cidades globais e RPG são explorados no presente artigo, com o argumento de que algumas cidades globais, por integrarem suas esferas de influência em RPG, funcionam como “g...

The concluding chapter returns to the five critical research issues identified in the introduction to the edited volume. It summarises how the book’s chapters have advanced our knowledge on these issues, puts the findings into a broader context and then suggests topics for follow-up research. Particular attention is drawn to four ideas. First, poli...

This chapter seeks to rebalance research on world cities, which suffers from a bias towards the Global North in theory building. For this purpose, the author advances the concept of ‘gateway cities’. In contrast to the world city approach, the gateway one addresses the global and regional interlinking of cities along five dimensions: transport and...

Development largely depends on how given places participate in global economic processes.The contributions to this book address various features of the integration of sub-Saharan Africa into the world economy via value chains, so as to explain corresponding challenges and opportunities. The book deals with five issues that have not been covered ade...

The introductory chapter illustrates the relevance of (research on) global value chains (GVCs) in sub-Saharan Africa. It provides an overview of the state of the art, and outlines the structure of the edited volume. Five key features of GVCs are identified, and the respective chapter contributions summarised: first, governance institutions and thei...

Energy has always been essential to economics and politics. While global energy consumption increases, fossil fuels are depleting. The countries that will be hit hardest by declining energy resources are the emerging economies of the Global South, where the relevance of the industrial sector is only slightly declining (or, indeed, still on the rise...

Gateway cities have received much attention from urban geographers. In spite of outstanding contributions being made, we think that the concept needs to be revisited with regard to regional development implications. Bringing together research on global production networks (GPNs) and world cities, this article shows that gateway cities are critical...

Regional integration via the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) received a significant boost when the South African parliament signed the corresponding agreement in October 2018. This article uncovers the convictions and objectives that drive South Africa’s commitment to the TFTA. It reveals that South Africa sees the TFTA as a means of “development...

Starting from the key concept of geo-economics, this book investigates the new power politics and argues that the changing structural features of the contemporary international system are recasting the strategic imperatives of foreign policy practice. States increasingly practice power politics by economic means. Whether it is about Iran’s nuclear...

Recent cases of power politics such as China’s One Belt, One Road strategy, Venezuela’s petro-diplomacy during the era of Hugo Chávez and Western sanctions against Iran and Russia indicate that economic means have become critical to how states exert power. Military means, meanwhile, appear to matter less. This shift in power politics is captured by...

The second-most powerful states in regional hierarchies—or “secondary powers”—can be expected to contest against regional hegemons. This chapter assesses the power that secondary powers in sub-Saharan Africa may wield vis-à-vis South Africa. It concentrates on “unintended contestation,” meaning policies that undermine regional hegemony but are not...

Geoeconomics has become highly relevant for foreign policy practices and national security strategies, wherefore it has also started to receive increasing attention from academics. Unfortunately, there is no widely shared definition of geoeconomics. The term is often only used as a catchword that generates an audience for policy-oriented, semi-scie...

Zusammenfassung Aufstrebende Wirtschaftsmächte sind Impulsgeber für den Globalen Süden. Weltstädte in diesen Ländern binden periphere Standorte in globale Güterketten ein und ermöglichen somit dort wirtschaftliche Entwicklung. In diesem Artikel wird das Konzept der „Gateway Cities“ entworfen und am Beispiel Kapstadts und des Öl- und Gassektors vera...

Geopolitical research is frequently pictured as a dead end. This article aims to revitalize geopolitics, reflecting both on the critique of the subject and the strengths that have marked it for more than a century. It is argued that geographical conditions constitute a set of opportunities and constraints, a structure that is independent of agency....

Eine Energiepolitik, die die Erderwärmung auf 2°C begrenzt, ist ohne Beteiligung der Schwellenländer nicht machbar. China, Indien und Indonesien spielen hierbei wegen der Größe und Dynamik ihrer Volkswirtschaften, entsprechendem Energiekonsum und Treibhausgasemissionen eine entscheidende Rolle. Zwar haben in den drei Ländern regenerative Energien e...

The countries comprising the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) are currently not very integrated into global value chains (GVCs), potentially missing out on important development opportunities. Accordingly, we explore high level options for promoting their integration. Given East Asia's spectacular success with integrating into GVCs, we first a...

Global energy consumption will increase rapidly in the next decades. The discrepancy between demand and supply is worrisome within the old and new cores of the world-economy. Sub-Saharan Africa meanwhile possesses vast potential for energy resources to be further exploited. Whilst the Global North is a traditional player in the sub-Saharan energy s...