Browsing by Subject "SMEs"

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Open Access
E-Commerce and Industrial Upgrading in the Chinese Apparel Value Chain
(Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2019-01-01) Li, F; Frederick, S; Gereffi, G
© 2018, © 2018 Journal of Contemporary Asia. The economic and social gains from electronic commerce (e-commerce) that promote innovation, industry upgrading and economic growth have been widely discussed. China’s successful experience with e-commerce has had a positive effect in transforming consumer-goods sectors of the economy and motivating economic reform. This article looks at how e-commerce reduces barriers to entry and enables firms to move up the value chain by using the global value chain framework to analyse the impact of e-commerce on the upgrading trajectories and governance structures of China’s apparel industry. For large Chinese brands, e-commerce has enabled end-market diversification. For small- and medium-sized enterprises, e-commerce has facilitated entry with functional upgrading as well as end-market upgrading. In the “two-sided markets” created by platform companies, the “engaged consumers” are the demand side of this market, and “e-commerce focused apparel firms” are the supply side of the new market. Consumers and platforms are more directly involved in value creation within this emerging internet-based structure.
Open Access
How do firms feel about participation by their peers in the regulatory design process? An online survey experiment testing the substantive change and spillover mechanisms
(Strategy Science, 2019-06-01) Malesky, E; Taussig, M
This paper examines two concerns with calls for increased participation by firms in the government design of regulations in emerging markets. First, given the profit maximization goals of firms, can the benefits of business participation be realized without weakening the social protections that regulations are meant to offer? Second, can resource-constrained states realistically use consultation programs to influence the behavior of enough relevant firms to achieve a reasonable breadth of social protection? We explore these understudied questions through an online survey experiment involving 121 firm managers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We find that firms prompted to think about worker safety favored regulatory changes that arose from suggestions by other firms over those resulting from suggestions by chemical safety experts even when unaware of the involvement of either source in the design process. By contrast, firms prompted to focus on business success did not express significant support for revisions suggested by either firms or experts. Learning about the participation of fellow firms positively influenced views about the legitimacy of the state's regulatory authority but not of the focal regulation itself.