This paper discusses coordination failures, their relevance to developing countries, and the circumstances under which they occur, arguing that that clusters can be seen as agglomerations of firms and organizations in related economic activities among which coordination failures are likely to arise. In other words, clusters provide opportunities for microeconomic interventions that promote coordination and collective action to improve productivity. Subsequently presented is a model of a small economy plagued by sector or cluster-specific coordination failures, which demonstrates that policy should foster cooperation in sectors where the economy already shows comparative advantage. In regard to innovation, general policies that aim to increase innovation across the board are likely to be inferior to policies that take a more selective approach by trying to induce the development of innovation clusters in areas of comparative advantage. The paper concludes with suggestions on how an understanding of coordination failures and clusters can form the basis for a set of effective microeconomic interventions for middle-income countries.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department in its series RES Working Papers with number
4431.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Luis Daniel Martinez).
Related research
Keywords:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)