| Popis: |
Most Latin American countries can be characterized as having one large metropolis, few medium sized towns and vast territories with low population densities. The impact of this fact on agro-industrial clusters has not been studied so far. "Economic distance" and limitations as to physical, human and social capital lead to clusters that are better defined as groups of micro-enterprises created in response to family survival requirements. Chile, one of the fast growing Latin American economies of the nineties with several star performances in the agribusiness sector, and the milk sector, have been taken as examples to illustrate these points. Indeed, in both, clusters are quite removed from the textbook examples. They rather tend to be moderately competitive, increasingly in foreign hands, with core decision making in the capital city or abroad, shallow as to local supply chains, embryonic as to their stage of development, and with low innovative capacity. And while there is a tendency to analyze "the" X cluster, evidence shows that even at the microregional level, there are substantial linkage and network differences within a same sub-sector. Finally, market liberalization policies seem to have increased the already prevailing centripetal forces and biases against small and medium enterprises. In the long run though, we see no alternative to a more equitable development at the geographical, income and decision-making levels. Decisive policies toward that aim are therefore a must. |
