Competition, Co-operation and Subcontracting - Lessons from the Clothing Industry in Thailand

Philippe Dulbecco () and Isabelle Vagneron

No 199827, Working Papers from CERDI

Abstract: A close examination of the organisation of the clothing industry in Thailand exhibits a rather paradoxical situation: although the structural features of the sector - the breaking down of the production process, high labour intensity, low asset specificity, low skilled labour - seem to legitimate a market co-ordination mechanism, it is a close, durable and multiform co-operation which cements, in Thailand, the relations between contractors and subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors themselves. We defend the idea that this kind of co-operative organisation of economic activities represents an appropriate answer to the flexibility required by ever changing markets. Co-operation is here understood as a mechanism of temporal co-ordination of economic activities which, far from substituting itself to the market co-ordination mechanism, rather completes it.

Keywords: Co-operation; Competition; Industrial district; Subcontracting; Thailand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25
Date: 1998
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Published in Development Research, 2001, pages 58-80
Published in Development Research

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