Industrial Upgrading in the Textiles and Clothing Industry: Pakistan and Late Industrialization

By Rajah Rasiah and Nazia Nazeer

The path towards charting industrial policy towards economic catch up increasingly recognizes the importance of a profound knowledge of firms, including their location, industry, and time specificities. Going beyond simple case studies, this pioneering book addresses these points.

In addition to showing a strong feel of firms through unravelling their internal operations, the empirical grounding and quantitative rigour articulated presents a rare research that locates firms in a taxonomy by trajectories of technological, organizational, and management capabilities of Pakistan's firms against the lead textiles and clothing manufacturing firms in the global value chain. It is also the first to locate a large set of firms in an international technology trajectory consisting of lead firms' right down to the bottom firms. In doing so, the book goes beyond existing works to demonstrate how firms, the embedding ecosystem, and governments in the developing countries can pursue the right strategies to stimulate industrial upgrading in general and in the textiles and clothing industry in particular. In addition, the inductive nature of the research undertaken offers a novel development in the textiles and clothing value chain.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198961677
• ISBN13: 9780198961673
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 240 Pages