Upgrading in Spain: An Institutional Perspective

Angela Garcia Calvo

No 329, Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto

Abstract: This paper frames and summarises the main contributions of a book-length project that aims to explain the recent rise of Spain’s firms in complex service sectors, and the parallel fall in skill- and capital-intensive manufacturing sectors, through an analysis of the institutional structure that enabled it. The paper argues that a form of strategic coordination called peer coordination (PC) was responsible for the Spanish pattern of upgrading. PC was a non-hierarchical variant of strategic coordination based on the presence of structural public-private interdependencies and direct statebusiness interactions. PC enabled large, well-established Spanish firms in complex service sectors like banking and telecommunications to maintain control of the home market and undertake costly restructurations but imposed few constraints on these firms, facilitating upgrading. The lack of effective intermediary agents hindered the development of PC in capital- and skill-intensive manufacturing sectors dominated by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Furthermore, PC in banking and telecommunications imposed additional constraints in manufacturing sectors like professional electronics, making it difficult for firms to access the patient capital and stable demand they needed to develop new, complex products. In exceptional cases, the central state and some regional governments were able to circumvent the limitations derived from PC and to create institutional structures that supported modest upgrades in some manufacturing sectors.

Keywords: industrial upgrading; Spain; institutions; business and government relations; public policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.carloalberto.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/no.329.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cca:wpaper:329

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().