McCormick+Schmitz Handbook for value chain research on - PACA

it may well be worth recording them separately. (You can always average them later if
this seems appropriate.) A key point in the actual interview is that the respondents base
their scores on their own actual experience. Otherwise you end up recording hearsay and
reproducing the cliché.
Having established the buyers’ comparative assessment of your region, it is useful to
complement it with their view of the future. While necessarily speculative, it can be very
instructive to have their answer to the question: “Do you expect that in 5 years from now
the percentage you buy from countries/regions X, Y, Z will have increased or decreased?
Why?”
Conclusion
This chapter has shown how you can make an up-to-date and comparative assessment of
the strengths and weaknesses of your local economy. The use of official statistics can
rarely provide such an assessment. This is not to say that such statistics should be
avoided or neglected. On the contrary, one of the key messages of this manual is to
complement different sources. Including the assessment of the buyers is particularly
important in the clothing industry, since it is the buyers who often drive the <strong>chain</strong> and take
the critical decisions on who is in or out of the race. The concern behind this manual is to
help ensure that it does not become a race to the bottom.
12. Learning from the manufacturers
In<strong>for</strong>mation from the garment manufacturers is essential <strong>for</strong> some of the mapping
exercises discussed in previous chapters. In this chapter we dig deeper and extract
in<strong>for</strong>mation from the manufacturers which help to explain what the maps show or why
they change. In this we will restrict ourselves to three issues which concern the use of
labour: the share of labour cost in total cost (Chapter 12.1), the advantages and risks of
externalising operations (12.2) and the use of core and fringe homeworkers (12.3).
12.1 Cost breakdown
If your work is concerned with improving the earnings of garment workers, you are likely
to find resistance on the part of the employers. They will argue that increases in wages or
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