Gerald A. McDermott is the department chair and a professor of international business at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Prior to joining the Moore School, he was an assistant professor of multinational management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania for seven years and held a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science.

He specializes in international business and political economy. McDermott received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at MIT. His first stream of research focused on the impact of industrial networks on the creation of economic governance institutions in post-communist countries. His current research in South America uses both comparative and statistical survey methods to examine the socio-political conditions under which societies build new innovative capacities to achieve sustained upgrading in their industries. Besides relevant scholarly articles, this work has thus far produced a highly unique multi-region, multi-sector (wine and autos) database with state-of-the-art measurements of firm-level upgrading capabilities, inter-firm networks and institutional networks. He has also recently launched a project about the impact of international integration regimes on local institutional development via a comparison of the EU accession, NAFTA and Mercosur.

His publications include articles in such scholarly journals as Comparative Political Studies, Industrial and Corporate Change, Review of International Political Economy, Academy of Management Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Organization Studies and Politics & Society as well as his book, Embedded Politics: Industrial Networks and Institutional Change in Post-Communism (University of Michigan Press, 2002), which was a finalist for APSA’s 2003 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the Best Book on government, politics and international affairs. McDermott has also consulted for the multilateral lending institutions and the governments of the Czech Republic and Argentina. He lived in Prague for over four years and in Buenos Aires for over six years, being fluent in both Czech and Spanish.