'Proactive fast-tracking' diffusion of supermarkets in developing countries: implications for market institutions and trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Supermarkets have spread extremely rapidly in developing countries after the ‘take-off’ in the early to mid-1990s. Former analyses of supermarket diffusion have not adequately explained the sudden burst and then exponential diffusion of supermarkets in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We argue that rather than taking demand and market institutional and organizational conditions as ‘exogenous’, as former analyses have tended to do, modern food retailers instead have treated local conditions as substantially ‘endogenous’. To enable their rapid growth, supermarkets undertake ‘proactive fast-tracking strategies’ to alter the ‘enabling conditions’ of entry and growth. Beside the retail investments that have been extensively treated in recent literature, these proactive strategies focus on improving the ‘enabling conditions’ via (i) procurement system modernization and (ii) local supply chain development. One important strategy retailers have used to facilitate (i) and (ii) is to form symbiotic relationships with modern wholesale, logistics and processing firms. An example we address is ‘follow sourcing’, where a transnational retailer encourages transnational logistics and wholesale firms with whom the retailer is working in home markets, to locate to the developing country. This is a spur to globalization of services in support of retail. Follow-sourcing has been treated for example in the automobile manufactures sector (follow-sourcing from spare parts manufacturers)—but not in the food sector. A second important strategy is that of multi-network-sourcing, in which supermarkets source from national, regional and global networks. We analyze that strategy here, adding to the literature which to date has touched on this theme only scantly, and for the first time identify typical paths, present preliminary evidence (from Central America and Indonesia) concerning this multi-sourcing-network strategy and discuss trade implications. One of these is the move to primacy of South–South trade in supermarket sourcing—a new dimension of globalization. By introducing this link of retailer transformation and trade into the literature, we hope to spur a new line of research that is timely in light of the trade, development and globalization debates in developing countries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".