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While global competitiveness is increasingly invoked as necessary for economic success stories, there are few answers available about how it can be achieved or maintained. The idea of stimulating industries to spur on economies is often proposed, but industrial policy can be seen as a boondoggle of government spending, and theorists of globalization are doubtful that such efforts can succeed in a world of fragmented supply chains. What Makes Clusters Competitive? tests fundamental theoretical hypotheses about what makes industries competitive in a globalized world by using the wine industries of several countries as case studies: British Columbia (Canada), Extremadura (Spain), Tuscany (Italy), South Australia, and Chile. Taking into account historical and location-specific characteristics, and drawing out policy lessons for other regions that would like to promote their industries, this volume demonstrates the value of applying cluster theory to understand market forces, while also describing the forces underlying the development of the wine industry in a range of different settings. An excellent resource for those interested in what makes industries succeed or struggle, What Makes Clusters Competitive? offers guidance for policymakers and the private sector on how to promote local industries. Contributors include David Aylward, Alexis Bwenge, Sara Daniele, F.J. Mesías Díaz, Cristian Felzenstein, Husam Gabreldar, F. Pulido García, Sarah Giest, Elisa Giuliani, Andy Hira, Mike Howlett, A.F. Pulido Moreno, and Oriana Perrone.

The book mainly uses the New Institutional Economics Approach (NIE) to examine the formation and development of industrial clusters in China through multiple case studies of textile and clothing clusters in the Zhejiang province. The micro case studies illustrate the interaction between institutional change and the industrial development of China in transition. It also attempts to fill the information gap through an analysis of the typical institutional factors leading to the development and upgrading of industrial clusters, and provides a better understanding of the changing nature of the public-private interface in the process of cluster development in China.

How are firms, networks of firms, and production systems organized and how does this organization vary from place to place? What are the new geographies emerging from the need to create, access, and share knowledge, and sustain competitiveness? In what ways are local clusters and global exchange relations intertwined and co-constituted? What are the impacts of global changes in technology, demand, and competition on the organization of production, and how do these effects vary between communities, regions, and nations? This book synthesizes theories from across the social sciences with empirical research and case studies in order to answer these questions and to demonstrate how people and firms organize economic action and interaction across local, national, and global flows of knowledge and innovation. It is structured in four clear parts. The first part looks at foundations of relational thinking. The next part is about relational clusters of knowledge. The third part looks at knowledge circulation across territories. The final part considers whether there is a relational economic policy. The book employs a relational framework, which recognizes values, interpretative frameworks, and decision-making practices as subject to the contextuality of the social institutions that characterize the relationships between the human agents.

Why the competitive forces and strategies of new wine producers are turning the global industry upside down.

Despite widespread agreement among economists that labor-intensive manufacturing has contributed mightily to rapid development in China and other fast-growing economies, most developing countries have had little success in raising the share of manufacturing in production, employment, or exports. Tales from the Development Frontier recounts efforts to establish light manufacturing clusters in several Asian and African countries, looking in particular at China. A companion volume to Light Manufacturing in Africa—which laid out a strategy for injecting new industrial growth nodes into African economies—Tales from the Development Frontier focuses on the six main binding constraints to competitiveness that nascent light manufacturing industries must overcome in developing countries: the availability, cost, and quality of inputs; access to industrial land; access to finance; trade logistics; entrepreneurial capabilities, both technical and managerial; and worker skills.The volume systematically explores potential growth opportunities in light manufacturing in a carefully selected subset of industries: agribusiness, apparel, leather goods, wood-working, and metal products. It specifies the constraints that need to be addressed before local and international entrepreneurs can take advantage of the latent comparative advantage available to many low-income economies in the target industries. It also proposes policies to ease the constraints—policies that can open the door to rapid increases in industrial output, employment, productivity, and exports.The outcomes described in this volume include both inspiring successes and miserable failures in addressing the binding constraints in the identified sectors. These examples reveal how and why industrial development efforts in poor countries—where, by definition, underlying conditions are far from ideal—can accelerate growth. Most of the firms described in a series of case studies started from a very simple and modest base in an environment full of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.With its rich array of new material, this book will support the ongoing research of policy analysts focused on China and other developing countries. Above all, the volume aims to embolden business entrepreneurs and government officials in low-income countries to pursue newly emerging opportunities to expand and accelerate the growth of light manufacturing in their home economies.

The economic crisis of 1997 called East Asia's economic miracle into question and generated widespread criticism of the region's developmental models. However, the crisis did little to alter the growing economic integration of American, Japanese and Chinese firms who have created cross-border production networks. This book addresses the changing nature of high-tech industries in Asia, particularly in the electronics sector, where such networks are increasingly designed to foster and to exploit the region's highly heterogenous technology, skills and know-how. Michael Borrus is Co-Director of the Berkeley Roundtable on International Economics (BRIE), at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adjunct Professor at Berkeley in Management of Technology. Dieter Ernst is Research Fellow at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and Senior Research Fellow at BRIE. Stephen Haggard is Professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, and Research Director at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego.

Globalization poses the imperative for firms to link with other actors and find new ways to interact and learn from the relationship. Employing original empirical evidence and featuring new case studies from Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Nicaragua, Upgrading to Compete shows that the form of governance matters most in these linkages, importantly affecting the upgrading process of local enterprises. By imposing new conditions for competitiveness in international markets, globalization poses the imperative for firms to link up with other actors and find new ways to interact and learn from the relationship. Upgrading to Compete: Global Value Chains, Clusters, and SMEs in Latin America shows that both the local and the global dimensions matter at once in these linkages. What matters most markedly, however, is the form of governance in value chains and clusters, which importantly affects the upgrading process of local SMEs. The book illustrates this point with original empirical evidence from several clusters in Latin America. New case studies from Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Nicaragua are supplemented by desk studies on other experiences in the region. At a time when there is growing interest in Latin America in active production sector strategies and in the role of SMEs, Pietrobelli and Rabellotti make in this book an essential contribution. Upgrading to Compete is full of quality information and insights. I look forward to the introduction of many of the ideas and recommendations of this book into policy action. José Antonio Ocampo Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations for Economic and Social Affairs

An effective and just industrial transition is necessary both to mitigate climate change and protect jobs, and as a precursor to enable other sectors to decarbonise. Activity is at an early stage and examples of successful sector-wide interventions to decarbonise industry do not yet exist. Governments of industrialised countries are beginning to develop policy and provide funding to support deployment of carbon capture and low-carbon hydrogen infrastructures into high-emitting industrial clusters, but options for sites outside of clusters, denoted here as ‘dispersed sites’, are also required. This paper takes a mixed methods approach to provide the first analysis of the issues facing dispersed industrial sites on their route to decarbonisation and to suggest solutions to the challenges they face. Using the UK as a case study, it first characterises dispersed sites in terms of location, emissions released, sectors involved, and size of companies affected. It then shows how these features mean that simply expanding the geographical scope of the present UK decarbonisation strategy, which focuses on the provision of carbon capture and low-carbon hydrogen, would face a number of challenges and so will need to be broadened to include a wider range of abatement options and other considerations to meet the needs of dispersed sites. While the solutions for each place will be different, these are likely to include some combination of the expansion of shared infrastructure, the development of local zero-carbon hubs, research into a wider range of novel abatement technologies and facilitating local participation in energy planning. The paper concludes with a discussion of remaining knowledge gaps before outlining how its findings might apply to industrial decarbonisation strategies in other countries.

In the past few decades, a variety of data-driven predictive modeling techniques has led to a dramatic advancement in mineral prospectivity mapping (MPM). The random forests (RF) algorithm, a machine learning method, has been applied successfully to data-driven MPM. However, there are two main challenges that need to be examined. Firstly, whether RF modeling can be used for the 3D MPM. The voxel (in 3D) has replaced the pixel (in 2D) to represent geological features, and so the capability of the RF model should be tested. Secondly, when we conduct regional-scale MPM, building a suitable conceptual model has a significant influence on the results; however, mineral deposit models often focus on just deposit-scale features. These two challenges were encountered in the case study in the Tongling ore cluster, which is the most representative skarn ore-concentrated area in the Middle–Lower Yangtze River Valley Metallogenic Belt in Eastern China. Thus, 3D geological models of the Tongling ore cluster were constructed from the multiple geological datasets. Then, a conceptual model was translated into 3D predictor layers. Finally, we tested and compared the MPM capabilities of the RF and compared it with weights-of-evidence (WofE) modeling. The results indicate that RF modeling not only outperforms WofE modeling in 3D MPM, but it also has capability to assess the relative importance of different predictor layers. Further testing of this method is warranted in other areas with different scales or metallogenic model to investigate fully its efficiency.