Industrial Upgrading in the Textiles and Clothing Industry: Pakistan and Late Industrialization

The path towards charting industrial policy towards economic catch up increasingly recognizes the importance of a profound knowledge of firms, including their location, industry, and time specificities. Going beyond simple case studies, this pioneering book addresses these points. In addition to showing a strong feel of firms through unravelling their internal operations, the empirical grounding and quantitative rigour articulated presents a rare research that locates firms in a taxonomy by trajectories of technological, organizational, and management capabilities of Pakistan's firms against the lead textiles and clothing manufacturing firms in the global value chain. It is also the first to locate a large set of firms in an international technology trajectory consisting of lead firms' right down to the bottom firms. In doing so, the book goes beyond existing works to demonstrate how firms, the embedding ecosystem, and governments in the developing countries can pursue the right strategies to stimulate industrial upgrading in general and in the textiles and clothing industry in particular. In addition, the inductive nature of the research undertaken offers a novel development in the textiles and clothing value chain. This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF dwnld from OUP and selected open access locations.

About the Author

Rajah Rasiah is Executive Director of the Asia-Europe Institute (Universiti Malaya). He obtained his doctorate in economics from Cambridge University (1992), and served as Rajawali fellow at Harvard University (2014). He held deanships at the Faculty of Economics and Business, UNIMAS (1999-2000), and Faculty of Economics and Administration, Universiti Malaya (2009-2010; 2013-2014). His international awards include the Celso Furtado Prize for advancing the frontiers of Social Science thought (Economics) in 2015 and the Merdeka Prize for scholastic achievement in 2018. He was appointed Distinguished Professor of Economics by the Malaysian government in 2017. Nazia Nazeer is an Associate Professor of Economics at the FAST School of Management, NUCES, Karachi, Pakistan. She earned her PhD in Economics from the Universiti Malaya, Malaysia, in 2019. Her specialization encompasses economics, technology, and innovation, with a research focus on the effects of technological advancements on economic growth and development, particularly in developing nations. Through her research work, she seeks to bridge theoretical insights with practical applications that promote economic progress.