ABSTRACT
Italian industrial districts (IDs) have undergone profound transformations since the mid-1980s. These changes reflect a fading of the district effect accompanied by increasing intra- and inter-ID heterogeneity of forms’ performance and characteristics, and growing internationalization in the form of enhanced participation in global value chains (GVC). In this chapter, we use the available empirical evidence on these recent transformations, and elaborate a novel typology of Italian ID organizational models (i.e. low-road IDs, locally rooted GVC-led IDs and outward-oriented GVC-led IDs), which could be useful to understand the transformations of clusters in other parts of the world.
