Uneven regional development in a contentious world of changing global production networks: ‘chips war’ and the geopolitics of semiconductor production in the United States and Southeast Asia

Since the late 2010s, the global economy has been confronted with immense challenges – from geopolitical tensions and climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic, territorial wars, trade conflicts and so on. While the unfettered economic globalisation of the 1990s and the 2000s might be over, a renewed interest in the global shift of industrial production (back to developed countries and their allies) has now preoccupied the policy priorities of many state authorities and regional institutions. In this context of a contentious world of production, the changing industrial organisation of economies activities has become one of the most disruptive forces shaping regional development. This paper first explores conceptually this recent change in relation to three important extra-regional processes that might shape the diverse trajectories of regional evolution and development beyond the mid-2020s: (1) policy regimes ‘elsewhere’; (2) the changing dynamics of strategic coupling; and (3) demand-led market shifts. It then offers some empirical illustrations through examining the so-called ‘chips war’ via state-led industrial policy and the reshoring of semiconductor production from Northeast Asia to the United States and Western Europe and new sites in Southeast Asia and their implications for respective host regions at the sub-national scale. My overall contention is that such a reactive political response to economic (over)globalisation is not necessarily a positive solution to addressing uneven regional development. There are likely unintended consequences of industrial policy that might exacerbate, rather than mitigate, uneven regional development.