Manufacturing relocations in the footwear industry: A comparison between italy and spain

The paper concerns the relocation of manufacturing activities earlier off-shored. More specifically, it is focused on back-shoring (relocations at the home country) and near-shoring (relocations in the region near the home country) decisions implemented by 25 Italian and Spanish belonging to the footwear industries. 41 relocation decisions were analyzed according a “3Ws” approach which allows to investigate the following issues: a) the content of reshoring decision (WHAT), b) the host countries (WHERE) and c) motivations induced companies to change their manufacturing locations (WHY). Among other contributions, authors enlarge the concept of “selective reshoring” earlier proposed in the extant literature. More specifically, they investigate selectivity in terms of “width” (number of back/near-shored product lines) and “depth” (number of production phases relocated). Several differences between the two country-based sub-samples were found and discussed taking into account the extant literature.