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| FROM LOCAL TO GLOBAL: THE CLUSTER UPGRADING RESEARCH IN GLOBAL VALUE CHAIN |
| WEN Hu, ZENG Gang |
| The Geography Department of East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China |
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Abstract The research of industrial cluster has changed from local to global in last five years. This paper is beginning from the retrospect of the cluster developing view of ‘new regionalism’, which emphasize the endogenetic factors of cluster. Those endogenetic factors include collective learning, interdependencies, and socio-cultural institutional dynamics within regions. And regional competitive advantage derives from those ‘local resources’ that may promote trust, collaboration and the accumulation of social capital across the full range of state, economic and civil society organizations. And then, this paper points out the sympathetic critiques of the new regionalism literatures that seek to reveal the limitations of these bodies of work with respect to understanding regional development in the contemporary era. Because the competition in economic globalization is so drastic that the regional economy can't develop solely. Local industrial cluster need linkage of outside. So the paper introduces the last research head way of foreign scholars, and indicates the upgrading theory that the life of cluster is not decided by the types, the regions and the time, which the cluster has held, but is decided by the upgrading ability of the cluster. We need to view the upgrading challenge in a wider perspective, capturing the central idea that it may involve changes in the nature and mix of activities, both within each link in the chain, and in the distribution of intra-chain activities. This is related to the achievement of new product and process development. Therefore, it is possible to identify four trajectories, which firm can adopt in pursuing the objective of upgrading, namely:process upgrading, product upgrading, functional upgrading, and chain upgrading. At last, this paper discusses the base frame of cluster upgrading in global value chain, and analyses the sense of global value chain in China.
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Received: 12 April 2004
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2005, Vol. 20 
