The Formation of Wenzhou Footwear Clusters: How Were the Entry Barriers Overcome?

Table 1 Annual Output and Export of the Wfenzhou Footwear Industry

It is interesting to observe that the footwear cluster formed in Wenzhou where, despite having
neither a legal nor a financial system which is well developed by existing standards, private
enterprises have mushroomed in the last two and a half decades. To address the questions
mentioned in Section 1, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Zhejiang
University conducted a joint survey in Wenzhou.

The investigation work was conducted by collecting related literatures and documents andby
interviewing numerous individuals including as key persons in the local societies, competent
government authorities as well as some senior predecessors and insiders. Concurrently, we
conducted further informal interviews with managers of some middle-small enterprises of the
footwear cluster to design and pretest our questionnair es and then finished them. From July to
October 2005, we conducted the formal field survey, covering the key footwear production bases,
including the first phase and second phase “Footwear City of China” industrial park in the
Lucheng district of Wenzhou City, the Shuangyu Industrial Park of Lucheng District, the Oubei
Township of Yongjia County and the Shenting Township of Ruian City and so on. We randomly
selected our investigation targets from the list provided by local government or administrative
departments of the industrial parks, and send one investigator to talk to the key responsible people
face to face and to finally fill in the questionnaire according to the information obtained. We
surveyed 140 existing footwear enterprises ⁶ including enterprises producing finished products or
parts of supplies, which account for 2.77% of the total enterprises of Wenzhou footwear cluster.
Table 2 presents the summary statistics of the survey.

Table 2 Statistics summary of the survey

⁶ We also attempt to investigate those founders of footwear enterprises who have vanished or changed their
businesses or had to give up due to the difficulty.

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