ABSTRACT
After the Second World War the economies of the industrial core regionsbegan to enter a substantially different phase in terms of what they pro-duced, how they produced it and where they produced it. This phase is sometimes referred to as advanced or disorganized capitalism. It typically involves a combination of ingredients:
It evolved in response to the increasing inflexibility of the old system of Fordist industrial capitalism. Faced with the saturation of domestic consumer markets, increasing overseas competition, increasing costs of unionized labour and of governmental welfare provision, the industrial corporations of the core economies began to pursue new and more flexible strategies. They reorganized themselves, redeployed their operations and revised their relationships with labour unions and governments. The result has been the deindustrialization of the core economies, the industrialization of certain semi-peripheral countries and the expansion of financial and business services on a global scale.
