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The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the case of selective industrial policies for the automotive industry in Thailand.

Founding on previous literature and official government documents, the authors describe the implemented policies, dividing them into four phases according to the main trend they followed. The authors suggest results the policies have or have not reached by analyzing the current state of the sector.

The main point is that selective policies implemented in the country were successful in helping the development of the sector as a whole, contributing to the role of Thailand as main actor in the international market. However, such policy initiatives were not able to solve some of the main issues of the automotive sector in the country related to local development, such as the technology dependence on foreign (mainly Japanese) firms and the weakness of local suppliers.

The authors frame the development of the automotive sector in a twofold perspective: on one hand, the international/exogenous factors and, on the other hand, the role of policy. The authors interpret the effects of selective industrial policy under the lens on both evolution and growth of the sector per se and on the enhancement of local capabilities. The work shows that the results do not go in the same direction.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a better understanding of the debt structuring of project finance (PF) loans and the main drivers affecting the maturity of bank loans in infrastructure deals. When banks grant loans to a project, they have two decision variables: the interest margin or the spread and the maturity of the loan. Although several studies analyze the drivers of the spread, few studies in the literature look at the maturity of bank loans. As infrastructure projects are typically highly leveraged, the structuring of bank lending is an important parameter in the financial viability of the project.

The paper develops a regression analysis of the loan’s maturity on four categories: characteristics of the project, political risk of the country where the project is executed, the macro-economic setting and the regulatory framework. By using a new data set of InfraDeals containing data on bank loans of more than 1,800 infrastructure projects worldwide from 1997 to 2016, this paper reveals new insights on the debt structuring of banks for PF loans.

The results indicate that the maturity of bank loans granted to infrastructure deals is predominantly driven by political risk and regulation, rather than the structuring of the project. This implicates that the region where the deal is closed weighs more heavily than the specificities of the project itself.

The results have important policy implications. The paper allows to develop a better understanding on how political risk and new regulation, like Basel III, might affect the PF market. The paper is the first one finding empirical evidence of the impact of Basel III regulation on PF lending. By delving deeper into the political risk variable, the authors formulate several recommendations to mitigate political risk.

This study aims to investigate consumers’ construction of food localness through the politics of belonging in a regional context.

Following a socio-spatial lens and considering the “realm of meaning” of place, this research focusses on local consumers’ lived meanings of “local” food choice, and hence adopts a phenomenological approach to the data collection and analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with residents of the Italian region of Marche.

Drawing on Trudeau’s (2006) politics of belonging, this study reveals three interconnected themes which show how local consumers articulate a local food “orthodoxy” and how their discourses and practices draw and maintain a boundary between local and non-local food, whereby local food is considered “autochthonous” of rural space. Thus, this study’s participants construct a local food landscape, conveying rural (vs urban) meanings through which food acquires “localness” (vs non-“localness”) status.

There exists further theoretical opportunity to consider local consumers’ construction of food localness through the politics of belonging in terms of non-representational theory (Thrift, 2008), to help reveal added nuances to the construction of food localness as well as to the complex process of formulating place meaning.

The findings provide considerable scope for food producers, manufacturers and/or marketers to differentiate local food products by enhancing consumers’ direct experience of it in relation to rural space. Thus, enabling local food producers to convey rural (vs urban) meanings to consumers, who would develop an orthodoxy guiding future choice.

The findings enable regional promoters and food policymakers to leverage the symbolic distinctiveness of food autochthony to promote place and encourage consumers to participate in their local food system.

By using the politics of belonging as an analytical framework, this study shows that the urban–rural dichotomy – rather than being an obsolete epistemological category – fuels politics of belonging dynamics, and that local food consumers socially construct food localness not merely as a romanticisation of rurality but as a territorial expression of the contemporary local/non-local cultural conflict implied in the politics of belonging. Thus, this study advances our theoretical understanding by demonstrating that food “becomes” local and therefore, builds on extant food localness conceptualisations.