Clusters and Regional Performance

Abstract

This study evaluates Porter’s (1997) premise that inner-city economic development could be facilitated by integrating inner-city businesses into regional clusters. Prior work shows that the presence of clusters creates externalities that improve regional performance. The authors extend that work by developing a framework to examine the role of clusters of related industries on job creation in the inner city. Unique data sets from the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City and from the U.S. Cluster Mapping Project are utilized to analyze the relationship between the strength of a regional cluster and the employment growth of inner-city industries during 2003 to 2011. The authors find that the initial strength of the cluster in the inner city, in the proximate city, and in the rest of the metropolitan statistical area are positively associated with employment growth within the inner-city cluster.