INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT POLICIES IN SOUTHERN CHINA: THE SPECIALISED TOWNS PROGRAMME

The aim of this article is to provide an updated picture of the ongoing policies implemented by the government of the Guangdong Province to foster the development (and the institutional acknowledgement) of a growing number of industrial clusters, defined as “specialised towns”. These policies have been implemented as part of an ambitious and impressive program called “one city-one product” plan organized in two phases. In the first phase (2000-2003) the program has mainly tried to rationalise the location choices of national and foreign firms that, starting from the Nineties, have gradually invaded and then saturated the central area of the Province. In the second phase (2003-ongoing) the program has been utilised to improve the territorial rebalancing, trying to foster the birth and development of specialised productive clusters also in peripheral areas characterised by a lower firm density and, more in general, by a lower GDP level. The article enters into the details of the initiative for the development of specialised towns, paying particular attention to the policies supporting the innovative and technological capacity of firms operating in the specialised towns.