On the spatial scale of industrial agglomerations

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in January 2015 AbstractStandard approaches to studying industrial agglomeration have been in terms of scalar measures of agglomeration within each industry. But such measures often fail to distinguish spatial scales of agglomeration. In a previous paper, Mori and Smith [37] proposed a pair of quantitative measures for distinguishing both the scale and degree of industrial agglomeration based on an explicit method for detecting spatial clusters. The first, designated as the global extent of industrial clusters, measures the spatial spread of these clusters in terms of the areal size of their essential containment, defined to be the (convex-solid) region containing the most significant subset of these clusters. The second, designated as the local density of industrial clusters, measures the spatial extent of individual clusters within their essential containment in terms of the areal share of that containment occupied by clusters. The present paper applies this pair of measures to manufacturing industries in Japan, and the results obtained are systematically compared to those of the most prominent scalar measures currently in use. Finally, these measures are shown to support certain predictions of new economic geography models concerning the relationship between shipment distances and spatial scales of agglomeration for individual industries.JEL Classifications : C49, L60, R12, R14

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