International Comparative Study On The Industry Upgrading In Japanese And South Korean Textile And Garment Industry Under Global Value Chain

From the global value chain perspective, Chinese textile and garment industry is in the low end of global value chain. Textile and garment enterprises are labor-intensive. Most enterprises do OEM production or undertake international production orders. So they only have small profit margins. In recent years, Chinese textile and apparel industry met with international trade protection, high international oil prices, international financial turmoil and weak international markets. Especially since the second half of 2008, the international financial crisis had a serious impact on Chinese textile and garment industry. We met a lot of difficulties:market supply and demand imbalance, business difficulties and so on. Inside of the country we faced with the RMB exchange rate reform, capital market downturn and other adverse factors.Therefore, Chinese enterprises are facing increasing difficulties and this low-end lock has seriously hampered the independent innovation. The textile and garment industry can only improve through industrial upgrading and then break the low-end value chain lock.In this paper, we choose Japan and South Korea as the targets as their textile and garment industry upgrading are successful and do some comparative research. Firstly, we study the upgrading background of these two countries and China. Then we have a conclusion:we can study from the two countries because the three countries have similar characteristics.Secondly we analyze Japanese and South Korean textile and garment industry upgrading path and find out that we can take the technological innovation-oriented path and use the OEM-ODM-OBM method to achieve upgrading. Then we summarize two factors impressing the upgrading path:the first one is the choice of innovative mode, the second one is the role of government in the upgrading.Finally we evaluate the two countries'upgrading effects with two methods. The first method is from the angle of global value chain and uses the VSS index. And the second one is on the perspective of industrial output results and uses AHP method. The conclusion is that Japan's industrial upgrading is better than South Korea's. Also the conclusion is a proof of the reality of the situation.By analyzing the main experience and the shortcomings of the textile and garment industry upgrading in Japan and South Korea we also propose suggestions for Chinese textile and garment industry.