翻译——全球价值链下产业升级.pdfVIP

附录 【原文】 UpgradinginGlobalValueChains 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; KaplinskyReadman, 2001; Porter,1990). Capitalizing on one of the most productive areas of the recent literature on SMEs, werestrict our field ofresearch to small enterprises located in clusters. Thereis nowa 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 ofspecialized 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 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 thespread ofinformation technologies, enterprises and clusters are increasingly integrated in value chains that often operate across many different countries. The literature on global