ABSTRACT
Introduction The economy is in a continual state of change as new ways of organizing the production of both goods and services are developed. Dynamism is driven by both technological and process innovations that result in the development of new products as well as new ways of creating products and services. Over the last two centuries the production of goods has been transformed from a predominantly local process to one in which the majority of the products are produced by value chains that combine expertise and labour skills located in many different places (Bryson and Rusten, 2008). What is occurring is an on-going and dynamic process of fragmentation of the value chains or production channels that create goods and services (Baldwin, 2006). The development of transnational value chains is traditionally associated with the global shift of manufacturing from high-cost to low-cost locations (Dicken, 2003) but is now also associated with the offshoring of services (Bryson, 2007b).
