The Development of Industrial Districts in Ecuador: The Leather Goods and Leather Wear Manufacturing Sector of Quisapincha

Introduction

During recent decades globalization has generated important worldwide changes in political, social, cultural, technological, organizational and economic terms. Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), by their nature rooted in the territory, and in particular those specializing in light manufacturing in the weak economic contexts of Latin America, have encountered great difficulties in penetrating the mainstream of national and international markets in this new globalized environment. Several authors have associated this problem with the lack of competitiveness due to their limited structure and low capital endowment (Aguiar et al., 2013), but also to their difficulty in accessing financial resources, technical knowledge and/or new production technologies (Venacio, 2007).

From the 1980s the spatial organization of production presented an increasing complexity of production cycles, with greater diversification and internal specialization of companies accompanied by a generalized attitude towards the formation of relations and network connections with other companies (Celata, 2009). This particular form of industrial development has transformed regions, which in many cases were backward and characterized by intense emigration flows, into poles of local development (Cooke, 1996; Ohmae, 1995; Krugman, 1991b; Storper, 1997; Porter, 1989, 1998a; Scott, 1988, 1998, 2002; Scott and Storper, 2003); some of them have become known worldwide for the quality of their production. The prevalence of small businesses, the importance of the family dimension and the work ethic that characterize these areas has transformed the territory where they are located, together with their traditions and specificities, into a fundamental and unrepeatable production factor (Celata, 2009), thus responding-in an autonomous and innovative way to the challenges of globalization.

Latin American MSMEs have been forced to develop mechanisms and strategies to adapt to this new reality, to strengthen their productivity and competitiveness, to expand their domestic markets or to open new markets abroad (Araya, 2006), taking advantage of the rediscovery and revaluation of territoriality (Scott and Storper, 1986) in the name of a new competitiveness based on local knowledge. One of the strategies adopted is the formation of different types of agglomeration of firms: industrial districts, cooperative networks, productive networks, clusters (Albuquerque, 2004). However, this process has not been easy and throughout the Latin American continent, where we can find business agglomerations with different levels of development, many of them still far from being considered true industrial districts and others even facing collapse.