sounds as though you’re describing not a supplier-driven, but a buyer-driven global economy. ... Why has China become so important? Who’s driving the process?
In the last 10 or 15 years, we have moved dramatically from a supplier-driven to a buyer-driven global economy. The key buyers are global retailers, on the one hand—
Like Wal-Mart?
Like Wal-Mart.
Target?
Like Target, JCPenney, Sears—big department stores. That’s one group of buyers. And another big group of global buyers are the global brands: Nike, Liz Claiborne, Disney—companies that don’t have stores, don’t have factories, but they’ve got a brand, and they want to supply those products in the cheapest fashion.
Those two [types of] companies—global retailers and global brands—together with the manufacturers in the U.S. who have outsourced their production, those three groups of companies have together formed this buyer-driven model, and it’s really turned economics on its head. We’ve moved from a supply-side view of the world economy to this buyer-driven model of the world economy, and it’s put power in the hands of a very different set of firms than the ones we traditionally would think of in terms of who drives modern capitalism.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/interviews/gereffi.html