ABSTRACT
The ‘branch plant economy has encapsulated many of the recurrent problems associated with precarious forms of industrialisation that have continued to undermine the development of economically peripheral regions. The history of dependent development within such localities has had a marked effect in perpetuating uneven and unequal geographies of local and regional economic prosperity. While the ‘branch plant economy’ has a long tradition in the regional economic development literature (Dicken 1976; Firn 1975; Massey 1995; Townroe 1975; Watts 1981), recent claims have been made concerning the emergence of a new type of branch plant with more progressive and developmental implications for local economies. These accounts of new ‘performance’ and ‘networked’ production plants have emphasised their qualitatively different character from their branch plant predecessors and their changed potential for local economic development (Amin et al. 1994; Cooke 1995; Morgan 1995; Morgan and Sayer 1988; Phelps 1993; Young et al. 1994). This work has tended to focus on greenfield developments associated with inward investment and their local and regional economic spin-offs.
