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Prof. Hubert Schmitz

Hubert Schmitz is Professor at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, UK. He is a Development Economist with 25 years of experience in research, teaching and advisory work.

His areas of specialisation include: industrialisation and employment, trust and economic performance, industrial clusters and collective efficiency, global traders and local producers, interaction of local and global governance, local upgrading in global chains, value chain analysis for policy makers. He has been an advisor to many international organisation and developing country governments.

Hubert Schmitz was invited to join the TCI Board of Advisors because of his work on collective efficiency and on globalised localities. The importance of collective efficiency for the competitiveness of local enterprises is now well recognised. Through conceptual and empirical work on industrial clusters, Hubert Schmitz and his IDS group contributed in the 1990s to a paradigm shift in research on small scale industry. This work culminated in a Special Issue of World Development on Industrial Clusters in Developing Countries edited by Khalid Nadvi and Hubert Schmitz (1999).

This work however neglected the relationships which local enterprises had with global players, prompting new research which integrated the local cluster and the global value chain approaches. The result is a new book:
Hubert Schmitz (ed), Local Enterprises in the Global Economy: Issues of Governance and Upgrading, Edward Elgar 2004.

This book opens a fresh chapter in the debate on local enterprises their strategies for upgrading. The debate on local upgrading is torn between two lines of thinking: those who believe that local relationships between enterprises and institutions are key to upgrading and those who argue that the spaces for upgrading are defined by the sourcing strategies of global buyers. From this debate a number of important questions arise: how feasible is it to develop local upgrading strategies? Can local policy networks make a difference or do global forces undermine them? Do global quality and labour standards marginalise local producers or do they help them to upgrade?
These and other questions are examined in case studies from developed and developing countries. Together, they provide a new understanding of how local and global governance interact, highlighting power and inequality in global chains but also identifying scope for local action.

Find more information about his publications and many other interesting papers related to clustering here: http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/global/cluster.html