SPAG: Index of spatial agglomeration

Abstract

The paper develops a spatial agglomeration index (SPAG) of the economic activity for the point geo-localizations of firms. It includes the effects of location, the distance between firms and the overlapping impact of the firms' size. The SPAG builds a new class of measures of the spatial density of the economic activity inside the region, based on the geometrical representation of firms with circles, without referring to the commonly used Ripley's K function. The SPAG measures the degree of divergence from the benchmark distribution, what detects different spatial distributions as clusters or borderline dispersion. We test SPAG with real point data. KEYWORDS density of economic activity, distance-based index, spatial agglomeration JEL CLASSIFICATION R12; R32; C43; D30

SPAG: A New Measure of Spatial Agglomeration. Theoretical Background and Empirical Examples1

“…The application of SPAG by policy makers, as well as the comparability between regions, sectors over time is easy and powerful. According to Kopczewska (2017), the SPAG index can be applied for measuring the degree of spatial agglomeration (concentration, clustering). In this situation, the index gives an opportunity to follow the agglomeration process.…”

“…According to Kopczewska (2017), the SPAG index as a measure of the degree of spatial agglomeration allows: 1) comparing the regions or sectors over time, 2) comparing sectors inside a region and between regions. The SPAG index uses combination of information on the area, size and sectors of companies.…”

“…These measures also omitted the MAUP, but their results are presented in an inconvenient form as a chart of the K function. Kopczewska (2017) proposed a new empirical measure of spatial agglomeration (SPAG) of economic activity based on the geolocation of firms. This measure is a distance-based measure and corresponds to a geometric model of spatial agglomeration (Marcon, Puech 2003Duranton, Overman 2005, 2008Arbia et al 2010;Mori, Smith 2014).…”

“…The aim of our paper is to introduce theoretical backgrounds of SPAG because this issue is not present in the original work by Kopczewska (2017). In this paper, we provide the background for this empirical indicator, using primarily the concept of the spatial process.…”

GIS-Based Survey over the Public Transport Strategy: An Instrument for Economic and Sustainable Urban Traffic Planning

“…Spatial analysis is a process by which processes can be modeled by spatially assessing the feasibility of interventions/investments for a given location, estimating and predicting results, interpreting and understanding changes, detecting patterns and more. It integrates the spatial perspective with statistical and alphanumeric information through a process of analysis and exploration of geospatial data [40,41].…”