Italian Industrial Districts Today: Between Decline and Openness to Global Value Chains by Elisa Giuliani and Roberta Rabellotti

ABSTRACT

Italian industrial districts (IDs) have undergone profound transformations since the mid 1980s. These changes reflect a fading of the district effect accompanied by increasing intra– and inter–ID heterogeneity of firms’ performance and characteristics, and growing internationalization in the form of enhanced participation in global value chains (GVC). In this paper we use the available empirical evidence on these recent transformations, and elaborate a novel typology of Italian ID organizational models (i.e. lowroad IDs, locally rooted GVC-led IDs, and outward oriented GVC-led IDs), which could be useful to understand the transformations of clusters in other parts of the world.