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Amidst heightened
competitive pressures, upgrading becomes
imperative for advanced industrial and
developing economies alike. A firm,
community or country that becomes
"trapped" in a given economic
niche or that fails to innovate is
unlikely to develop in an era during
which prosperity hinges in part on the
capacity to shift rapidly into
advantageous niches of an increasingly
globalized system of production and
exchange.
One type of
upgrading involves intersectoral shifts,
commonly described in accounts of the
East Asian miracle. Intra-sectoral shifts
are associated with what might be labeled
phase II upgrading. Here, one aspect of
upgrading concerns product niche, both in
terms of specialization and quality.
Moving from one level of activity to
another within a transnational production
chain constitutes a second key aspect of
Phase I I upgrading: the unprecedented
decentralization of highly integrated
economic activities implies that a
particular set of actors may specialize
in a limited number of functions along a
given global commodity chain or
cross-national production network.
In this context, efforts are
being performed together with USA,
European and Asian reseach institutions
on work about productive chains between
local enterprises and Transnational
companies (TNCs) in the region, focusing
-in a first step- in the Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT) and the
Electronics and Software Sector.
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