Industrial district and social capital in Taiwan's economic development: An economic sociological study on Taiwan's bicycle industry (China).

摘要

This study examines the micro-level social mechanisms and processes that have contributed to the competitiveness of Taiwan's small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the global market. Mainstream accounts of Taiwan's economic achievement operate on the macro-level and emphasize the importance of either the free market or the developmental state in coordinating economic activities. This dissertation focuses on the micro-level social processes and institutions and proposes a network-centered perspective on economic development. Through qualitative fieldwork and statistical analysis of the development of Taiwan's bicycle industry—an important example of Taiwan's export success—this dissertation attributes the competitiveness of Taiwan's bicycle producers to the positive effects of the collocation of same-sector firms and the social patterns of collaborations among them. More specifically, the concentration of bicycle producers into industrial districts in central Taiwan, based on long-term relationships of trust and repeated transactions, has enabled them to producer high-quality bicycle and parts in a wide array of styles at competitive prices. Also, through the global commodity chains, these SMEs placed their products in the global market with shortened lead-time. Besides these advantages, the study also found that entrepreneurship was prevalent in the central Taiwan bicycle districts because skilled workers and business-minded managers could exploit numerous niches spawn by the fine social division of labor within each district, and combine their particular specialties with external resources to found their own firms.; Although bicycle producers in the industrial districts cooperated with one another extensively, there was no shortage of competition. Competition occurred mainly among firms that work on the same stage of production. The structure of vertical cooperation along the supply chain and horizontal competition among firms had worked well for Taiwan's bicycle producers until the early 1990s when many firms seeking lower production costs began to migrate to China. Going beyond conventional explanations of industrial migration in terms of relative prices of production factors, this dissertation investigates the social and political institutional sources of this phenomenon. By comparing the industrial districts of Taiwan's bicycle industry with those of northern Italy, the study found that the weakness of local public authorities and industrial associations in Taiwan: a product authoritarian-corporatist regime during the past half-centruy, has resulted in a failure to provide collective service essential for industrial upgrading by individual firms. The findings have crucial implications understanding the “hollowing-out” of Taiwan's mature industries in the past decade.