In October I was invited to take part at the round table on Becattini’s Legacy: Industrial Districts and Clusters organized by the Società Italian degli Economisti in Cosenza.
Here is my intervention
On the 30th of June I presented a paper co-authored with Elisa Giuliani at SASE Conference in Lyon. This is a chapter in the book on Local Cluster in Global Value Chains edited by Maria Chiarvesio, Valentina De Marchi and Gary Gereffi.
Here is the presentation.
On the 13th of October I gave a talk at the ClusDev MED Workshop Utrecht University.
On the 7th of April I presented a paper on Italian industrial Clusters in Padua at the Workshop Evolving IDs within Global and Regional VCs.
It investigates the evolution of specialization patterns for the Italian provinces over the period 1995-2005 by analysing the dynamics of the sectoral distribution in the Balassa index of revealed comparative advantages. The results show that underlying a relatively stable distribution of national comparative advantages over time, there are wide variations in local performance: only a few provinces demonstrate any stability in their specialization over the last decade, with the majority showing decreased specialization. We find a higher average degree of persistence for provinces with districts, but no systematic differences between provinces with or without industrial districts. District provinces show wide variation, with a few concentrating on their past comparative strengths, but many diversifying.
Since the second half of the 1990s the Italian economy has experienced a significant slowdown in the rate of economic growth. The ‘dwarfism’ of its manufacturing firms, their specialisation in traditional sectors and their organisation in industrial districts have been identified by many scholars as major structural weaknesses in the Italian industrial system. Nevertheless, there is a vast and flourishing empirical literature showing that many industrial districts are actually changing in terms of sector specialisation, international and innovation strategies and emergence of new forms of enterprise organisation. In this paper, we provide a critical survey of the new and different patterns of industrial organisation emerging in industrial districts.
The aim of this study is to analyse the main determinants of the adoption and use of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and the relationship between ICT and the patterns of innovation in an Italian industrial district. The analysis is carried out on a database of 118 textile enterprises located in Biella, a well known industrial district specialised in medium to high quality woollen yarns and textiles, which have been interviewed following a structured questionnaire.
On the whole, the rate of adoption and use of ICT in Biella is rather low, confirming the results of other studies on industrial districts specialised in traditional sectors. Nevertheless, our analysis also shows that considering ICT as a general technology may be misleading. It is instead useful to disentangle among different ICT; in particular, there are significant differences between IT involving production, administration and logistic processes and communication technologies (CT). Moreover, we have tested on a smaller sample of 50 firms the hypothesis that adoption and use of ICT may positively influence innovation. Here, the most interesting finding is that different types of innovations, i.e. product, process and organisational innovations, are influenced by very different variables.
The notion of ‘Business Development Service’ (BDS) is quickly gaining popularity among policy makers and scholars of management, industrial organization and development. Similarly, attention is increasingly paid to the institutions and centers offering BDS, as an essential part of the ‘local’ or ‘regional innovation system’. The paper analyses the experience of BDS Centres in three highly developed Italian regions, Emilia Romagna, Lombardia and Veneto, and evaluates their performance and contribution to the regional industrial, and notably SME, development. The paper is based on a survey of 30 BDS Centres and it uses quantitative together with qualitative evidence.
Download the pdf, JA WRSTSD 2007-01
It examines the impact of globalisation of production on the Italian footwear sector and investigates the structural changes taking place in some shoe districts as they join international production networks.
The following questions are discussed: Are Italian footwear districts specialising in particular phases of the production cycle? Is there a trend towards the reduction of activities carried out within districts? Or are different patterns emerging according to the districts’ main market segment and to the value chains (e.g. luxury fashion market or mass market) they belong to?
The study explores these issues using data on outward processing trade (OPT) collected by Associazione Nazionale Calzaturieri Italiani (ANCI) to analyse the fragmentation of production in the footwear sector at “provincia” level. The available disaggregation of data allows us to investigate the different outsourcing strategies and emerging trends within the district. Two case studies are presented; one on Riviera del Brenta in Veneto and the other on Barletta in Puglia.
In the footwear districts investigated, we find evidence of different international delocalisation strategies. We argue that these different patterns of specialisation are closely related to the clusters’ market position and suggest that these patterns influence the clusters’ potential for future competitiveness.
This paper is concerned with the impact of globalisation on local competitiveness in Brenta, one of the most important Italian footwear districts. The aim is to integrate the typical industrial district approach with the global value chain approach. To understand the changes confronting Brenta, the paper distinguishes between enterprises operating in a) the top brand chain, dominated by the owners of global brands in the luxury market, and b) the high quality chain in which German buying groups aggregate many independent footwear stores. The questions addressed are: Is globalisation pushing Brenta towards new value chains? What types of governance characterise the relationships between local and outside actors? Do the chains’ leaders come from inside or outside the districts? Does the integration of industrial clusters in global value chains enhance or weaken local upgrading strategies? One of the main findings is the increasing importance of the top brand value chain in the district. To be part of the chain, Brenta’s shoe producers accept a functional downgrading, abandoning design and marketing and focusing on production. Nonetheless, the remarkable recent growth rates in the luxury industry, which is built around global top brands, have allowed local producers in this chain to perform better that those in other chains.
Industrial districts have attracted the attention of development economists in the search for new models of industrial development. Many case studies have shown that clustering helps local enterprises to overcome growth constraints and compete in distant markets. However, empirical studies also reveal shortcomings of the industrial district model. This paper shows that, within the districts, there is enormous heterogeneity by size and performance. Even though clustering firms feed on each other, they vary a great deal in the strategies they employ and the growth they achieve. This internal heterogeneity is investigated for three cases: the shoe industries in Italy, Brazil and Mexico.
The success of industrial districts in Europe has attracted the interest of development economists in their search for new industrial development models. This study explores the extent to which the industrial district ‘model’ explains the realities of four footwear clusters in Italy, the ‘land’ of districts, and in Mexico, a less developed country. Empirical investigation confirms that there are gains from clustering; however, differences have also been identified in the intensity and quality of collective effects between the realities studied and the ‘model’. Those differences are attributed to disparities in the external environments, to heterogeneity of economic actors, and to the adoption of a dynamic approach to interpret cluster growth trajectories.