THE RELEVANCE OF THE FLEXIBLE SPECIALIZATION PARADIGM FOR SMALL-SCALE INDUSTRIAL RESTRUCTURING IN GHANA

This article focuses on a large cluster of small enterprises in Kumasi, Ghana. It suggests that the flexible specialisation paradigm only helps to explain the growth of some of the small enterprises, namely a group of engineering workshops. However, due to deep inter-firm division of labour, their innovation has also raised the capacity of other firms in the cluster to improve their equipment and output. Nevertheless, in spite of such emerging collective efficiency, the majority of producers have done more to swell the number of firms than to raise overall quantity or quality of output.