SMEs’ competitiveness and international trade in the era of Global Value Chains (GVCs) in Tanzania: An assessment and future challenges

Abstract

International trade continues to play a crucial role in economic transformation in African countries. The rise of Global Value Chains (GVCs) presents opportunities through which international trade can be effectively conducted. GVCs facilitate organization of trade, international production and investment by locating different stages of production process across varied countries. This presents opportunities to integrate Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) into global trading systems but also may generate challenges particularly to resource constrained SMEs. Reviewing the challenges for the participation in international trade and possible integration into GVCs by Tanzania’s SMEs, the results show that the major challenges for SMEs internationalization are international marketing related constraints and global competition (69%), supply side constraints (56%), unfriendly investment climate (50%) and financial constraints (37.5%). As such, the role of trade policies remains critical in mitigating some of these challenges through formulating friendly legal and regulatory frameworks, enhancing SMEs productivity by building their managerial and technical capacities, minimizing trade costs, and increasing trade openness. However, given the current global, regional and domestic developments in Tanzania, trade policies need review so as to respond to the changing global trade landscape but also promote policy harmony, coherence and complementarities among varying implementing institutions, deficiency of which is debilitating policy implementation at present