What is industrial upgrading, and which types of countries do it? List the four stages associated with industrial upgrading. In each of the four stages, be sure to provide more than a phrase-give specific examples of how industrial upgrading occurs in that stage. What is the overall effect of industrial upgrading on wages and working conditions?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but should include the definition of industrial upgrading: A process in which nations, firms, or even workers take on progressively more complex and higher-value production activities. This is a means for middle income countries to enter the global economic market or move up that market by becoming more competitive economically.
Industrial upgrading has four stages: 1. Assembly is the ability to assemble more complexly, such as incorporating electronic components into a full smartphone and branding it to the name of the client that now makes a phone and not just parts for the phone. 2. Original equipment manufacturing is a process in which the nation, firm, or worker will design and produce a television that conforms to the client's specifications and is sold under the client's brand. 3. Original brand-name manufacturing. In stage 3, companies may now design and sell their own automobile or phone with their own brand name. 4. Original design manufacturing is the fourth and final stage and therefore is the most complex, in which a company designs and produces a high-end product for the market that is simply purchased and resold by the client. An instance might be designing a high-end audio speaker that is now put into every Apple laptop. Wages and working conditions improve as nations or companies move to higher levels of complexity.