经济金融企业管理外文翻译外文文献英文文献.docx

1、经济金融企业管理外文翻译外文文献英文文献附录 【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, con

2、trasting 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 cap

3、abilities 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

4、 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 th

5、e 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 horizo

6、ntal 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, enterprises and clusters

7、 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

8、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 participate in clusters

9、 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

10、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

11、 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 in the same value

12、 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.

13、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 environm

14、ent 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 innovat

15、ion 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 introduces a categorization

16、 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 cluste

17、ring and participating in global value chains offer different opportunities for upgrading in different groups of sectors. Section5 summarizes and concludes. 2. CLUSTERS AND VALUE CHAINS During the last two decades, the successful performance of industrial districts in the developed world, particular

18、ly 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,

19、 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 thes

20、e 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 o

21、f 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 cap

22、ture 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 fir

23、st 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 3 (JA).Such join

24、t 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: On

25、ly 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. However, recent changes in produ

26、ction systems, distribution channels and financial markets, accelerated by the globalization of product markets and the spread of information technologies, suggest that more attention needs to be paid to external linkages. 6 Gereffis global value chain approach (Gereffi, 1999) helps us to take into

27、account activities taking place outside the cluster and, in particular, to understand the strategic role of the relationships with key external actors. From an analytical point of view, the value chain perspective is useful because (Kaplinsky,2001; Wood, 2001) the focus moves from manufacturing only

28、 to the other activities involved in the supply of goods and services, including distribution and marketing. All these activities contribute to add value. Moreover, the ability to identify the activities providing higher returns along the value chain is key to understanding the global appropriation

29、of the returns to production. Value chain research focuses on the nature of the relationships among the various actors involved in the chain, and on their implications for development (Humphrey & Schmitz, 2002b). To study these relationships, the concept of governance is central to the analysis. At

30、any point in the chain, some degree of governance or coordination is required in order to take decisions not only on what should be, or how something should be, produced but sometimes also when, how much, and even at what price. Coordination may occur through arms-length market relations or non mark

31、et relationships. In the latter case, following Humphrey and Schmitz (2000), we distinguish three possible types of governance:(a) network implying cooperation 4 between firms of more or less equal power which share their competencies within the chain; (b) quasi-hierarchy involving relationships bet

32、ween legally independent firms in which one is subordinated to the other, with a leader in the chain defining the rules to which the rest of the actors have to comply; and (c) hierarchy when a firm is owned by an external firm. Also stressed is the role played by GVC leaders, particularly by the buyers, in transferring knowledge along the chains. For small firms in less developed countries (LDCs), participation in value chains is a way to obtain information on the need and mode to gain access to