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Internet platforms like Google, Amazon or Facebook substantially shape our everyday lives. With their coordinated products, they create their own socio-technical ecosystems and act as gatekeepers that set and control rules. Their economic dominance is increasingly being addressed by competition authorities in Europe. Contrary to how they are often perceived, platforms are not neutral “intermediaries”, but powerful actors that shape opinions and public discourses - so far largely without much public control. Yet recently, debates regarding appropriate regulatory strategies are gaining momentum. To limit market dominance, restrictions to horizontal mergers in the same or similar sectors (e.g. Facebook's takeovers of Instagram or Whatsapp) and the banning of vertical mergers are discussed. This is done to prevent the market dominance of the platforms from spilling over from one business sphere to the next. The case for a closer interlocking of competition law with agendas of consumer and data protection is also being made. Moreover, proposals drawing on public utility regulation are developed since internet platforms can, in many respects, be compared to traditional infrastructures. Understanding internet platforms as a new field of public service provision would, among other things, guarantee universal access, similar to traditional "analogue" infrastructures. As history has shown, it is possible to regulate powerful actors in the interests of society as a whole and subjecting them to democratic checks and balances. This would imply to take a broader perspective on economic dominance and approach the problems pragmatically.

The functioning of commodity markets has changed related to processes of financialization that involve two major developments - the rise of financial interest on commodity derivative markets through the increasing presence of financial investors and the changing business models of international commodity trading houses and the increasing importance of these markets in price setting and risk management since the liberalization of national commodity sectors. A critical question is how these global financialization processes affect commodity producers in low income countries via the operational dynamics of global commodity chains and distinct national market structures. This paper investigates how global financialization processes influence how prices are set and transmitted and how risks are distributed and managed in the cotton sectors in Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Tanzania. It concludes that uneven exposure to price instability and access to price risk management have important distributional implications. Whilst international traders have the capacity to deal with price risks through hedging in addition to expanding their profit possibilities through financial activities on commodity derivative markets, local actors in producer countries face the challenge of price instability and increased short-termism - albeit to different extents deepening on local market structures - with limited access to risk management.

Regional suppliers still play an important role in the global apparel industry. By studying the experience of Romania's apparel sector, the paper highlights, first, the importance of multiscalar institutional, macro and policy contexts in analyzing the articulation of and up- and downgrading experiences in global production networks. These include the Multi-Fibre Arrangement, EU trade agreements and accession, the global economic crisis, and the specific institutional and policy context of post-Socialism. Second, the paper stresses the existence of diverse, non-linear and uneven up- and downgrading trajectories and of reactive adaptation rather than pro-active firm strategies. This questions the ideal upgrading account often portrayed in chain and network research.

This paper shows the importance of ownership, end markets and regionalism within the global value chain (GVC) conceptual framework. This is done through unpacking the development trajectories of the major Sub Saharan African (SSA) apparel export industries (Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya, Lesotho, Swaziland) against the backdrop of global and regional trade regime changes and the manner in which different supplier firms react to these opportunities and/or constraints. These trajectories demonstrate the emergence of a new regionalism centred around investment and differentiated end markets. Ownership characteristics of supplier firms shape the ability to shift between different end markets and respond to lead firm requirements; and the level of their local and regional embeddedness impacts on different forms of upgrading. More locally and regionally embedded firms in these SSA countries have been able to shift with uneven success to new, and in particular regional, markets. In contrast, Asian-owned transnational producers remain focused on the US market with limited market opportunities and upgrading potential. Different types of ownership and embeddedness dynamics are therefore important to explain the co-evolution of highly differentiated value chain dynamics creating a variety of apparel industrialization trajectories in the apparel export industry in SSA.

Over the past three decades the global economy has witnessed the rise of organizationally fragmented and geographically dispersed global production networks (GPNs). An increasing amount of literature drawing on chain and network conceptualizations has accumulated on how these changes affect countries, regions and firms. Comparatively little has, however, been said about the effects on workers and their roles in GPNs. Although the expansion of global production arrangements has been an important source of employment generation in many developing and transition countries, this quantitative assessment reveals little about the qualitative aspects of work nor about the sustainability of these jobs. This paper assesses how integration into GPNs in the increasingly important fast fashion apparel segment, that is based on increased variety and fashionability and on permanently shrinking product life cycles, is impacting on workers and social upgrading. It particularly assesses whether the sourcing practices related to fast fashion, such as short lead times, high flexibility, speed of production, low costs and high quality, create additional hurdles for workers to achieve social upgrading. The focus is on the apparel industry in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Euro-Mediterranean Rim ("Greater Europe") with case studies on Morocco and Romania due to their importance as regional and fast fashion suppliers to Western European buyers.