The “deglobalization” of the auto industry can enable emerging economies to create more jobs and improve mobility of both the rich and poor worldwide, according to a study.
This was among the conclusions reached by an International Labor Organization (ILO)-commissioned study, authored by Tommaso Pardi, director of Europe-based GIS Gerpisa.
“The automobile industry is now undergoing transformation, which is driven by both globalization and also by deglobalization, the process of diminishing interdependence and integration between certain production units around the world,” Pardi said. “Deglobalizing trends are not so much fueled by protectionism but by the very nature of the product.”
Deglobalization, Pardi added, has allowed automobile manufacturers in emerging economies to have the same advanced system as compared to their western counterparts.
While this allowed more workers in these facilities to have gainful employment, many remain temporary workers. Pardi said automobile manufacturers can change this by improving labor relations in their companies.
Further, the deglobalization Pardi is seeing can make green transport more affordable for middle- and lower-class families and/or individuals.
Local research and development and reverse engineering, which are among the tenets of deglobalization, can allow emerging economies to come up with affordable but environment-friendly transport options.
“In other words, it would set out to ensure that markets would become [once again] drivers of progressive change in their capacity as political and social institutions,” Pardi said.
“This would push manufacturers themselves, and the industrial ecosystems they promote, to become [once more] the agents of social progress,” he added.
In the Philippines, the Chamber of Automotive Manufacturers of the Philippines Inc. (Campi) and Truck Manufacturers Association (TMA) said sales grew 17.1 percent in the first semester of 2017.
The Campi and TMA said the June 2017 sales reached 37, 631 units, pushing the total first-half sales to 196,164 units.
The January-to-June sales haul is 17.1 percent higher than the same period in 2016, when sales were at 167,480 units.