Inward investment from foreign manufacturing firms has been sought as a remedy to regional industrial problems in the UK. Foreign manufacturing offers the prospect of industrial diversification, new jobs and incomes, and can also represent a stimulus to new ideas and practices in domestic...

In recent years it seems that both regions and cities appear to have become more eager to present themselves as regions or cities in which new or mobile firms in certain industrial sectors (especially perhaps biotechnology) should locate. At the same time, in the UK at least, there has been...