Book Description
After more than a decade Michael Porter¿s book Competitive Advantage of Nations stays ahead of the other books, in particular as alternative framework from the comparative advantage idea inspired by Adam Smith.This small book is merely a small proposition, a postscript perhaps, to Porter¿s book, with basic idea that one cannot rely merely on industrial processes alone to keep stay ahead of market changes. Hence, for cities in developing countries the municipal shall find out their city¿s potential resources, and develop their city starting from there, instead of striving blindly in the conventional industrial path.We focus our discussions in this book on cities, because in our opinion a city is the smallest economic entity which has 'auto-poiesis¿ character. A city can grow by itself, and its administrators can only expect to affect its growth, rather than stop its natural grow path. What we would like to emphasize here is the word 'alternative¿ in this book title. What we mean is that the proposed strategy is not always true for all conditions. for instance, in Hawaii, where industrialization and resources are very few the best strategy is perhaps to foster its 'cultural approach'. Meanwhile for other cities where there is no extensive cultural potential, then industrialization approach seems still working.After all we do not pretend to have the last word on proper remedies to problems encountered by each developing country. It would need substantial study based on each particular country¿s problems, contexts and resources. We also introduce for the first time the Poly-Emporium Theory; which etymologically comes from poly = many, and emporium = trade center, store with a wide variety of selling things; therefore poly-emporium is the study of interactions among many (big and small) firms in the market.This book is now available in Indonesia in Gramedia bookstore, Jl Matraman Raya, Jakarta, Indonesia