外文翻译全球价值链下产业升级.doc

外文原文 ：
Upgrading in Global Value Chains

The aim of this paper is to explore how small- and medium-sized Latin American enterprises

( SMEs) may participate in global markets in a way that provides for sustainable growth.

This may be defined as the "highroad" to competitiveness, contrasting with the "low

road，" typical of firms from developing countries, which often compete by squeezing wages

and profit margins rather than by improving productivity, wages, and profits. The key

difference between the high and the low road to competitiveness is often explained by the

different capabilities of firms to "upgrade.，In this paper, upgrading refers to the

capacity of a firm to innovate to increase the value added of its products and processes

(Humphrey & Schmitz, 2002a; Kaplinsky&Readman, 2001; Porter, 1990).

Capitalizing on one of the most productive areas of the recent literature on SMEs, we

restrict our field of research to small enterprises located in clusters. There is now a wealth

ofempirical evidence (Humphrey, 1995; Nadvi & Schmitz, 1999; Rabellotti， 1997)

showing that small firms in clusters, both in developed and developing countries, are able

to over come some of the major constraints they usually face: lack of specialized skills,

difficult access to technology, inputs, market, information, credit, and external services.

Nevertheless, the literature on clusters, mainly focused on the local sources of

competitiveness coming from intracluster vertical and horizontal relationships generating

'' collective efficiency5 5 (Schmitz, 1995)，has often neglected the increasing importance

of external link ages. Due to recent changes in production systems, distribution channels,

and financial markets, and to the spread of information technologies, enterprises and

clusters are increasingly integrated in value chains that often operate across many different

countries. The literature on global value chains (GVCs) (Gereffi, 1999; Gereffi& Kaplinsky,

2001) calls attention to the opportunities for local producers to learn from the global

leaders of the chains that may be buyers or
l
producers. The internal governance of the value chain has an important effect on the
scope of local firms，upgrading (Humphrey& Schmitz, 2000).

Indeed, extensive evidence on Latin America reveals that both the local and the global

dimensions matter, and firms often participate in clusters as well as in value chains

(Pietrobelli& Rabellotti， 2004). Both forms of organization offer opportunities to

foster competitiveness via learning and upgrading. However, they also have remarkable

drawbacks, as, for instance, upgrading may be limited in some forms of value chains, and

clusters with little developed external economies and joint actions may have no influence

on competitiveness.

Moreover, both strands of literature were conceived and developed to overcome the

sectoral dimension in the analysis of industrial organization and dynamism. On the one hand,

studies on clusters, focusing on agglomerations of firms specializing in different stages

of the filie're, moved beyond the traditional units of analysis of industrial economics:

the firm and the sector. On the other hand, according to the value chain literature, firms

from different sectors may all participate in the same value chain (Gereffi, 1994).

Nevertheless, SMEs located in clusters and involved in value chains, may undertake a process

of upgrading in order to increase and improve their participation in the global economy,

especially as the industrial sector plays a role and affects the upgrading prospects of SMEs.

The contribution this paper makes is by taking into account all of these dimensions

together. Thus, within this general theoretical background, this study aims to investigate

the hypothesis that enterprise upgrading is simultaneously affected by firm-specific efforts

and actions, and by the environment in which firms operate. The latter is crucially shaped

by three characteristics: (i) the collective efficiency of the cluster in which SMEs operate,

(ii) the pattern of governance of the value chain in which SMEs participate, and (iii) the

peculiar features that characterize learning and innovation patterns in specific sectors.

The structure of the paper is the following: in Section 2，we briefly review the concepts

of clustering and value chains, and focus on their overlaps and complementarities. Section

3 first discusses the notion of SMEs' upgrading and then introduces a categorization of

groups of sectors, based on the notions underlying the Pavitt taxonomy, and applied to the

present economic reality of Latin America. Section 4reports the original empirical evidence

on a large sample of Latin American clusters, and shows that the sectoral dimension matters

to explain why clustering and participating in global value chains offer different

opportunities for upgrading in different groups of sectors. Section5 summarizes and

concludes.

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2. CLUSTERS AND VALUE CHAINS During the last two decades, the successful performance of

industrial districts in the developed world, particularly in Italy, has stimulated new

attention to the potential offered by this form of industrial organization for firms of

developing countries. The capability of clustered firms to be economically viable and grow

has attracted a great deal of interest in development studies. 1

In developing countries, the sectoral and geographical concentration of SMEs is rather

common, and a wide range of cases has since been reported. 2 Obviously, the existence of

acritical mass of specialized and agglomerated activities, in a number of cases with

historically strong roots, does not necessarily imply that these clusters share all the

stylized facts which identify the Marshall type of district, as firstly defined by Becattini

(1987). 3 Nonetheless, clustering may be considered as a major facilitating factor for a

number of subsequent developments (which may or may not occur): division and specialization

of labor, the emergence of a wide network of suppliers, the appearance of agents who sell

to distant national and international markets, the emergence of specialized producer

services, the materialization of a pool of specialized and skilled workers, and the formation

of business associations.

To capture the positive impacts of these factors on the competitiveness of firms located

in clusters, Schmitz (1995) introduced the concept of "collective efficiency" (CE) defined

as the competitive advantage derived from local external economies and joint action. The

concept of external economies 4 was first introduced by Marshall in his Principles of

Economics( 1920). According to Schmitz (1999a)，incidental external economies (EE) are of

importance in explaining the competitiveness of industrial clusters, but there is also a

deliberate force at work: consciously pursued joint action

(JA). Such joint action can be within vertical or horizontal linkages. 5

The combination of both incidental external economies and the effects of active

cooperation defines the degree of collective efficiency of a cluster and, dynamically, its

potential for fostering SMEs， upgrading. Both dimensions are crucial: Only incidental,

passive external economies may not suffice without joint actions, and the latter hardly

develop in the absence of external economies. Thus, our focus is on the role of intracluster

vertical and horizontal relationships generating collective efficiency.

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