1、 6 外文翻译 原文 Learning and Earning in Global Garment and Footwear Chains Material Source： The European journal of development research Author： Hubert Schmitz This article explores the power of the global value chain approach in explaining the growth of production capabilities and the distribution of ga
2、ins. It suggests that the upgrading opportunities of local enterprises are structured by the relationships in global value chains. This is shown clearly for the case of the garment and footwear industry, where advances have been rapid in product and process upgrading but more limited in functional u
3、pgrading. With regard to the distribution of gains, the global value chain approach also provides clear hypotheses but the empirical evidence remains weak. INTRODUCTION It is universally acknowledged that the amount of trade that regions engage in has a fundamental effect on their economic developme
4、nt. There is much less knowledge about how trade is organized and how this affects economic development. Recent global value chain (GVC) analysis has made some important advances in this field. Its central proposition is that it matters how trade is organized: it matters for understanding market acc
5、ess, the acquisition of capabilities and the distribution of gains. In the thinking on trading relationships, one can broadly distinguish between three phases: Traditionally, the relationships between producers and customers are thought to be market-based. This assumption continues to prevail (thoug
6、h not always explicitly) in many textbooks concerned with international trade. In the 1970s and 1980s, the importance of intra-firm trade was highlighted in research on multinational corporations and their subsidiaries. In the 1990s, a new form of coordinated trade was shown to be of increasing impo
7、rtance: lead firms from developed countries coordinate (or govern) the trade with developing country firms that remain nominally independent. 2 Over the past two decades, this latter form of trade has grown particularly fast. It gave rise to a new line of research: GVC analysis shows that there are
8、new opportunities which come from operating in global chains but also limits and traps. This paper analyses these in detail, focusing on the prospects for developing country enterprises and workers in the garment and footwear industry. The paper seeks to answer three questions: how are garment and f
9、ootwear chains governed? What are the implications for learning and upgrading? What do we know about the distribution of gains in these chains? The remainder of this introduction highlights those aspects of the GVC approach which are critical for understanding the empirical parts of the paper. A val
10、ue chain is the sequence of all the activities required to make a product or provide a service. This in itself is a very simple concept which becomes useful for analytical and policy purposes, once we consider that: First, the activities are often carried out in different parts of the world, hence t
11、he term global value chain; Second, some activities add more value and are more lucrative than others (the policy-makers concern is to help local enterprises to move into the lucrative activities); Third, some actors in the chain have power over the others. The powerful actors are often called the l
12、ead firms who seek to govern the chain. Chain governance means that lead firms set and/or enforce terms under which the others in the chain operate. A central concern of value chain analysis is to understand the relationships between global lead firms and local producers and the opportunities and co
13、nstraints that result from entering such relationships. Understanding why lead firms seek to govern chains and how chains are organized is critical because it helps to understand the acquisition of capabilities and the distribution of gains analyzed later in this paper. In garments and footwear, the
14、 lead firms tend to be the global buyers. Why would these lead firms go to the trouble and expense of setting up and supervising supply chains? No firm will incur the expense of developing arrangements with specific suppliers in order to purchase products that the market freely provides. There are t
15、wo reasons why the global buyers do not rely on the market and seek to govern their chains: Product definition. The more the buyers pursue a strategy of product differentiation, for example, through design and branding, the greater the need to provide suppliers with precise product specification and
16、 to ensure that these 3 specifications are met. Risk of supplier failure. The increasing importance of non-price competition based on factors such as quality, response time and reliability of delivery (together with increasing concerns about safety, labors and environmental standards) means that buy
17、ers have become more vulnerable to shortcomings in the performance of suppliers. Reducing the time-to-market has become particularly critical in garment and footwear chains due to ever-changing fashions. Not all chains are governed by powerful lead firms. Some chains are merely strings of market-bas
18、ed relationships: there is transaction but little interaction in terms of exchanging information and learning from each other. In other chains there is intensive interaction but the relationships between enterprises are uneven. More systematically, one can distinguish between four types of relations
19、hips in value chains. Arms-length market relations. Buyer and supplier do not need to develop close relationships because the product is standardized or easily customized. A range of firms can meet the buyers requirements. When problems arise buyers move on to different suppliers. Modular networks.
20、Firms develop information-intensive relationships, dividing essential competences between them. The buyer provides the design and product specification and highly competent suppliers provide products and services at short notice to any kind of specification drawing on the specializations in their cl
21、uster. Information intensity is high, transactional dependence is low and confidence in supplier competence is high. Captive networks. In this case, one firm exercises a high degree of control over other firms in the chain. In garment and footwear chains, buyers often specify the characteristics of
22、the product to be made by their suppliers, specify the processes to be followed and inspect that these specifications are followed. Typically this occurs when the buyer has doubts about the competence of the supply chain. Hierarchy. The lead firm takes direct ownership of some operations in the chai
23、n. The case of the intra-firm trade between a trans-national company and its subsidiaries falls into this category. These four categories represent a continuum from loose to very tight relationships between global lead firms and local suppliers. The categories and typologies found in the literature
24、vary slightly depending on the purpose of the 4 investigation.1 the fine differences between them do not matter here; the key point is that distinguishing between different types of chains is important because some types of chains offer local producers better development prospects than others. A cen
25、tral proposition of GVC analysis is that the development prospects for local producers vary with the way chains are organised.2 the remainder of the paper examines this proposition for the garment and footwear industry. The paper is structured as follows: the next section draws together the availabl
26、e evidence on chain organization. Subsequent sections then bring out the implications for the acquisition of capabilities and examine the (scarce) evidence on the distribution of gains along the chain. In all these sections the focus is on global chains; the final section asks what difference it mak
27、es if local firms feed into national chains. The central proposition of early GVC research was that trade with developed countries was increasingly coordinated by global buyers. This proposition came from Giraffes research on the East Asian garment industry carried out in the 1990s (Gereffi, 1999).
28、The question examined in this section is whether subsequent research on the garment and footwear industry confirms this proposition. Unfortunately the question cannot be answered by drawing on global trade statistics. Trade data informs us about the quantity and direction of trade but not about the
29、way trade is organised. The best one can do is piece together an overview based on the (often qualitative) case material. Likely Trends in Chain Governance This section has brought together the main findings on how garment and footwear chains are governed, using the chain categories proposed in the
30、Introduction. These categories are ideal types and reality does not fit neatly into these boxes. Nevertheless, they help us not to get lost in the complexities of the real world and provide a frame for recording and understanding key differences between types of chains. As regards changes over time,
31、 it seems that in the 1980s and 1990s captive chains have increased in importance as a way of sourcing garments and shoes from developing countries. While the exact share is difficult to determine, the importance of such buyer-driven chains seems to have increased in both absolute and relative terms
32、. Will this trend continue? In order to answer this question, a number of issues need to be considered: 5 Concentration in retailing. The general increase in chain governance is connected to the big changes in retailing in the advanced countries. Brands play an increasingly important role in enterpr
33、ise strategy. While there is no hard data about the relative importance of branded versus non-branded products, the importance of brands seems to increase, particularly in consumer products such as garments and footwear, and particularly for products aimed at young people. Risk of supplier failure.
34、As stressed earlier, the risk of supplier failure is a key driver of chain governance. Scouting for new producers. There is, however, a counter-tendency. Speed and flexibility. As indicated above, some captive developing country regions are likely to mature and develop modular production networks wh
35、ich have information intensive but flexible relationships with their main customers. Governance from outside the chain. The type of chain governance that emerges depends to some extent on whether parameters (noticeably quality, labour and environmental standards) are set and enforced by agents outsi
36、de the chain. B2B electronic commerce. It was widely predicted that B2B (business to business) electronic commerce would make it easier for developing country producers to access developed country markets. Upgrading in Captive Chains As noted above, our starting point is Gereffis optimistic view tha
37、t producers entering captive (buyer-driven) chains have good prospects for upgrading within production and subsequently into design, marketing and branding. On the basis of his research on the garment chains he suggests that East Asian suppliers working for large US buyers were on an upgrading traje
38、ctory from OEM all the way to ODM and even OBM.5 Gereffi attributes this to organizational succession, a process by which manufacturers start producing for buyers catering for the low end of the market and then move up to buyers targeting more sophisticated market segments: In our terminology, not j
39、ust product and process upgrading, but also functional upgrading. Consensus on Product and Process Upgrading To what extent can this finding be generalized? Most authors would agree with Gereffi that local producers experience significant product and process upgrading. 6 Local producers learn a grea
40、t deal from global buyers about how to improve their production processes, attain consistency and high quality, and increase their speed of response to customer orders. This upgrading effect is not automatic. First, it requires continuous investment by the local firms themselves in people, organizat
41、ion and equipment. But the local producers own efforts are rarely enough and the foreign buyers are critical for accessing distant knowledge and markets. Second, buyers do not always provide support for this upgrading. Some accounts suggest that buyers present challenges to suppliers but do not prov
42、ide support to help meet these challenges. For example Gibbon (2000) gives an account of the relentless pressure that foreign buyers put on the clothing manufacturers of Mauritius to improve their processes and products apparently without providing active support to cope with these pressures. Upgrad
43、ing in Market-based Chains It was argued in the Introduction that there were two main reasons for the development of explicit coordination of GVCs, that is, the buyers role in product definition and the risks to the buyer of supplier non-compliance with product or process requirements. It follows th
44、at market-based value chains tend to develop when these two factors do not apply. In particular, when: Products are standard (produced to well-known designs available to many companies) and can be evaluated cost-effectively with regard to critical characteristics at the point of sale. The buyers are
45、 design takers, who buy products from suppliers who take responsibility for design and production. In this case, the supplier may be considered to have greater competences in these areas than the buyer. This is most likely to occur when the buyers are relatively small. Clearly, in spite of the risin
46、g level of trade in differentiated (non-standard) products, many products are traded through arms-length market relationships. In these cases, the supplier has to be able to meet the requirements of customers, design products and have marketing know-how. The question then is where this knowledge com
47、es from. Upgrading by Operating in Different Types of Chains A conclusion which can be drawn from the analysis presented so far is that the 7 explanatory power of the chain approach increases with the extent of explicit coordination of the chain. In particular, the section on captive chains shows a
48、clear pattern: that is, producers in developing countries experience fast process and product upgrading while functional upgrading is often blocked. In some cases, however, local producers are able to overcome these difficulties. Explaining these cases is the purpose of this section. In order to do
49、so we need to widen our focus. The analysis so far has assumed that enterprises operate in only one type of chain. In many cases, this is true not just for particular firms but for entire clusters. Concentrating on the implications of this dominant type of chain governance is a sensible way to proceed. However, we risk not recognizing some of the most interesting upgrading experiences unless we consider those cases in which firms operate in several types of chains simultaneously. This conclusion can be drawn from the study of Bazan and Nava
