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1、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

2、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 t

3、he 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

4、over come some of the major constraints they difficult skills, specialized of lack face: usually 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

5、 vertical and horizontal relationships generating collective efficiency（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, enter

6、prises 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

7、chains that may be buyers or 1 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 part

8、icipate 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,

9、 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

10、 clusters, focusing on agglomerations of firms specializing in different stages of the filiere, 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

11、 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 p

12、rospects 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, a

13、nd 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 le

14、arning 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 2 introduce

15、s 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