Indrustrial upgrading and regional development. Czech automotive industry

This dissertation thesis draws on global value chains and global production networks perspective in order to analyze and measure the probability of international relocation of production and the intensity of industrial upgrading. Continuous industrial upgrading may be regarded as vital precondition for higher-cost countries to maintain their competitiveness face- to-face increasing costs of production factors. In the first part, the author asked which manufacturing industries in Czechia are the most threatened by relocation of production activities to lower-cost countries and if the cost- oriented "nomadic" investments are concentrated in economically less developed regions with high unemployment rate and available investment incentives. In the second part, the author measured the intensity of industrial upgrading in the broadly defined Czech automotive industry since 1998, which is considered a key branch of the Czech economy. The question was whether the Czech-based automotive firms were able to upgrade their production activities in order to maintain competitiveness despite rapidly growing production costs and falling demand during the EU automotive industry crisis in 2008-2009, so that significant impacts on the traditional regional pattern of unemployment in Czechia were expected. Two unique..