Lessons from a case of adaptation to the international slow down : the industrial district of Jepara, Indonesia

We studied the furniture industry structure of Jepara and did a quantitative analysis of the flows among its firms and between its firms and markets. Apart from demonstrating that the official figures were underestimating the number of enterprises, workers, and economic spillovers, we found that around 9.m3 or round wood was able to sustain 1 fulltime employee per year. We found that Jepara had witnessed a boom of demand by the western markets from the late nineties, to later face a critical drop of the demand after a series of environmentalist campaigns. At the same time the industry had also faced a severe shortage of raw material supply. The organization of the production, typical of an industrial district, allowed the firms to adapt and address other markets. Among the factors which allowed it, we identified a high level of intertwined relationships and subcontracting between the production units, a high specialization of them, and a prevalence of the small and very small units in various steps of the production, compared with the bigger integrated units (Résumé d'auteur