Importance Of Agglomeration Research Articles

The dynamics of industrial geographic distribution: evidence from Brazil (2002-2014)

ABSTRACT The geographical distribution of Brazilian industries changed between 2002 and 2014, and it was more significant for some industries. Based on Dumais et al. (2002), we explore the dynamics of these changes by a decomposition of the employment variation and concentration index for manufacturing industries grouped by technological intensity, and we identify the direction of the locational movements of the firms among microregions. In general., the results indicate that between 2002 and 2014, there was a trend of convergence among the microregions’ participation in industrial employment, contributing to industrial deconcentration in the country, with the exception of the group of high-technology industries, which became more concentrated. Components of the life cycle of industries, especially the growth of employment generated by new industries in non-metropolitan microregions, are identified as main propelling of this evidence. In general., the results are consistent with the importance of agglomeration economies over historic accidents to explain the industrial concentration in Brazil between 2002 and 2014.

Donner du sens à la Northern Powerhouse

The Northern Powerhouse (NPh) is a UK government initiative for increasing the economic competiveness of the North of England launched by the former Chancellor, George Osborne in 2014. Informed by the new urban economics and the importance of agglomeration and urban scale and density in fostering competitiveness, the NPh sought to pool the strengths of the Northern core cites, principally Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield, as a kind of transformative urban counter-weight to London. This article aims to assess the nature and wider significance of the NPh, considering its evolution and impact since 2014. It argues that the NPh is a spatial economic narrative that has gained the support of a wide range of Northern interests, but that its coherence and implementation has been undermined by a lack of national government commitment and leadership since 2016.

Urban Economies and Productivity

Productivity levels and productivity growth rates vary significantly over space. These differences are perhaps most pronounced between countries, but they remain acutely evident within national spaces as economic growth favors some cities and regions and not others. In this paper, we map the spatial variation in productivity levels across Canadian cities and we model the underlying determinants of that variation. We have two main goals. First, to confirm the existence, the nature and the size of agglomeration economies - that is, the gains in efficiency related to the spatial clustering of economic activity. We focus attention on the impacts of buyer-supplier networks, labour market pooling and knowledge spillovers. Second, we identify the geographical extent of knowledge spillovers using information on the location of individual manufacturing plants. Plant-level data developed by the Micro-economic Analysis Division of Statistics Canada underpin the analysis. After controlling for a series of plant and firm characteristics, analysis reveals that the productivity performance of plants is positively influenced by all three of Marshall's mechanisms of agglomeration. The analysis also shows that the effect of knowledge spillovers on productivity is spatially circumscribed, extending, at most, only 10 km beyond individual plants. The reliance of individual businesses on place-based economies varies across the sectors to which the businesses are aggregated. These sectors are defined by the factors that influence the process of competition - access to natural resources, labour costs, scale economies, product differentiation, and the application of scientific knowledge. Neither labour market pooling, buyer-supplier networks nor knowledge spillovers are universally important across all sectors. This paper provides confirmation of the importance of agglomeration, while also providing evidence that external economies are spatially bounded and not universally important across all industries.

Patterns of Knowledge: The Geography of Advanced Services and the Case of Art and Culture

Much emphasis has been placed on the importance of agglomeration economies as a backbone to urban and regional growth. Case study research points out that particular cities and regions have a competitive advantage in industrial activity over others, yet we have little by way of a satisfactory means of formally studying the geography of these industrial patterns to demonstrate how the specific case studies fit into a larger pattern of agglomeration that can be applied to more than one place. Is the agglomeration itself in fact exhibiting statistically robust and significant patterns? What do the patterns look like and how do they differ by region? Using geographic information systems to analyze spatial autocorrelation and “hot spots” of industries, we compare the ten most populous metropolitan statistical areas across several “advanced” service sectors (professional, management, media, finance, art and culture, engineering and high technology). We find that much of the qualitative evidence on industrial clustering is evocative of broader macro patterns that are both similar and dissimilar across industries and geographies. Our results indicate that there are three spatial typologies of growth in the advanced services within U.S. urban regions. These typologies allow us to intimate qualities of place in general and of places specifically that drive the agglomeration of advanced services. New York City's art and culture and media industries represent key examples of geographically unique cases within advanced services that are explained relative to existing literature regarding the importance of density and cross-fertilization across industrial fields.