ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to offer an analytical framework for evaluating the implications of recent economic events on the spatial distribution of economic activities; and of the role played by multinational enterprises (MNEs)1 and cross-border inter-firm coalitions2 of firms on the international and intra-national division of labor. In particular, we shall be concerned with the parallel, yet apparently antithetical, forces towards the geographical dispersion of asset augmenting and asset exploiting activities,3
and the concentration of such activities in limited spatial areas; or what Ann Markusen (1996) has referred to as the paradox of “sticky places within slippery space.”
