Logistics Clusters: Delivering Value and Driving Growth

Abstract

While there is a burgeoning literature on global value chains and production networks, much less attention has been paid to the activities that truly make the globalised world work. Our attention is constantly pulled towards the tangible, the things we see and touch each day, and thus material products have always received a disproportionate amount of the attention of academic researchers in economics and innovation studies. After all, services are so much harder to study, and logistics perhaps harder than many others because its business is mobility and business-to-business. It is easy to forget and harder to see. This book addresses this hidden aspect of innovation, and for that reason is welcome. Curiously, given this context, the author chooses as the focus not the links in the chain of logistics (e.g. cargo and container shipping), but the nodes in the chain: the less obvious topic of a behind the scenes economic activity. It is all the more interesting for that. Logistics clusters, those physical places on the planet where different links in multiple chains cross paths are more than warehouses, ports and airports.