ABSTRACT
The 1990s witnessed the globalisation of the production process as multinational enterprises (MNEs) began to relocate production of labour-intensive activities to the developing world economies. This became possible as developing economies opened in the 1980s and 1990s after the debt crisis, which highlighted the non-sustainability of import substitutions industrialisation schemes in closed economies, both in ‘socialist’ state-led economies (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), China) and in capitalist (Latin America, Africa, pro-Western Middle East and North Africa (MENA)) countries (Oman 1994; Adda 2012). Industrialising economies from the developing world began to compete to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) as it became one of the main vehicles to create export platforms for manufactured products and generate technology and management know-how spill over.
