Industrial Clusters as Drivers of Sustainable Regional Economic Development? An Analysis of an Automotive Cluster from the Perspective of Firms’ Role

Abstract

This paper examined the relationships among firms in a rapidly growing specialized industrial cluster—the Chery automotive cluster located in the Wuhu Economic and Technology Development in eastern China. After demonstrating how the Chery automotive cluster contributed to sustainable regional economic development, it focused on defining the roles that major firms play in the localized production network. Based on three attributes of the firm (network linkages, network position, and network power), the study identified a typology of firms’ role, including the dominant core, lead firms, gatekeepers, intermediaries, club of foreigners, peripherals, and loners. By revealing the heterogeneity of the firms and discussing the differing roles they play in the network, the paper made some policy recommendations to promote the sustainable development of the cluster, including providing policy supports to core firms, encouraging inter-firm networking and interaction, and diversifying the cohort of gatekeepers.

Clustering and firm productivity spillovers in Indonesian manufacturing

“…The recent studies (for example Abdullah and Chowdhury, 2020 ; Latief et al., 2020 ; Nguyen et al., 2020 ) address the mixed findings of the earlier studies by pointing out the firm heterogeneity issue; it is argued that firm heterogeneity might reduce the precision of findings as some firms are not fully extracting the productivity benefits from FDI; hence empirical findings of existing literature remain inconclusive. Firm heterogeneity issue can be minimized by clustering firms into homogenous groups and estimate them separately ( Chen et al., 2020 ; Kowalski, 2020 ) or adding some specific factors that accounted for the variation in ability to grasp productivity benefits, such as firm age, ownership, and competitiveness ( Esquivias and Harianto, 2020 ; Morrales and Moreno, 2020 ) or breaking down the FDI-productivity into technology and efficiency ( Nguyen et al., 2020 ). This paper contributes to the empirical debate within the framework of foreign direct investment to Indonesia by clustering firms into nine homogenous groups based on product similarity in the International Standard of Industrial Classification (ISIC).…”

Impact of COVID-19 on private driving behavior: Evidence from electric vehicle charging data

“…The public health emergency response was reduced to Level-3 on March 15, 2020 (blue vertical line) and human activities were mostly back to normal. At the same time, it is worth noting that the daily charging demand in Wuhu was significantly higher than that of other cities due to the rapid development of the automotive industry in Wuhu and the support of the local government ( Chen et al, 2020 ).…”

Assessing Firm Readiness to Adopt Cluster-Based Innovative Projects: A Segmentation Analysis

“…Innovation projects denoted a clear sample of high project intricacies as the management was significantly influenced by flexible strategy adoption for project planning [40][41][42]. Nevertheless, high innovative project management versatility resulted in challenging decision-making processes [43], specifically when the intricacies were associated with collective long-term ventures, such as clusters [44][45][46]. Porter [47] denoted clusters as a collaboration of firms, training centers, and research institutes within a specific geographical space to establish synergies around collective innovative projects.…”