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This paper contributes to the current discussion in the development commu-nity on options for value chain promotion. It specifically looks at regional value chains at the sub-national level, since this will often be a promising level of intervention for business promotion activities. Value chains are de-fined here as the sequence of business activities that turn raw materials into products that are sold to final customers.

The paper is organised as follows. In the first section I summarise the academic discussion on clusters, value chains and net-works. In Section 2 I briefly present some experiences with value chain promotion in regional development in European countries. In Section 3 I summarise two experiences with regional value chain promotion in Brazil. In Section 4 I discuss the options of using PACA to organise a regional value chain initiative.