The agglomeration patterns of twenty-six manufacturing and service sectors in and around Paris in 1999 are analysed. The method used measures the intensity of spatial agglomeration and identifies the location patterns of economic sectors. First the locational Gini coefficient and Moran's I statistics of global spatial autocorrelation are computed. These provide different but complementary information about the spatial agglomeration of the sectors under study. Then exploratory spatial data analysis tools are applied. Moran scatterplots and local indicators of spatial association statistics reveal great diversity in location patterns across sectors.

This paper investigates the spatial distribution of employment in the region of Ile-de-France in 1978 and 1997. Exploratory spatial data analysis is used to identify employment centres and a sectoral analysis of the central business district (CBD) and sub-centres is performed. The results highlight a process of suburbanisation of employment in Ile-de-France between 1978 and 1997. A more polarised space emerges in 1997 than in 1978, with several employment centres specialised in different activities. Moreover, even if the spatial influence of the CBD declines over the study period, the CBD maintains its economic leadership by concentrating a large variety of high-order producer services.

This paper extends the analysis by Dall'erba and Le Gallo dealing with the impact of structural funds on the growth process of European regions. Like most of the other 18 contributions assessing the efficiency of structural funds, our article was based on a global model of b-convergence: one coefficient pertaining to the structural funds variable was estimated for the whole sample. In this paper, we extend this approach by performing local estimations, where one coefficient is estimated for each region, so that the impact of structural funds can be regionally differentiated. As in the previous contribution, the presence of spatial spillover effects is taken into account using spatial econometric techniques, but here we apply a Bayesian locally linear spatial estimation method on a conditional b-convergence model, which allows global and local b-convergence to be viewed in a continuous fashion. Our results indicate that structural funds have a weak global impact on the European Union regional growth process, but that their local impacts are very diverse, with a positive influence on the growth of British, Greek, and southern Italian regions.

Because of their intensive need for face-to-face contacts, producer services have, historically, been found at the core of the central business district (CBD). However, it has been suggested that advances in information technologies could lead to the erosion of the CBD's economic base, rendering face-to-face contacts obsolete and enabling producer services to suburbanize. Although a considerable amount of empirical work has been done on the suburbanization of these activities in North America, the same is not true of France. In this paper, we adopt an original methodology to study the role played by face-to-face contacts in the spatial distribution of producer services in the Île-de-France region between 1978 and 1997. Our findings confirm that producer services did indeed suburbanize during the study period. Nonetheless, this suburbanization was multicentric, rather than scattered, suggesting that face-to-face contacts remain an important factor in the location of such services. [

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