Urban Hierarchy or Local Buzz? High-Order Producer Service and (or) Knowledge-Intensive Business Service Location in Canada, 1991-2001

Differences in hi‐tech immigrant earnings and wages across Canadian cities

“…However, only nine cities have a location quotient of greater than one for the aggregate hi-tech industry class, namely Calgary, Halifax, Moncton, Montréal, Oshawa, Ottawa, Saint John, Toronto and Vancouver. This finding also confirms previous studies that have identified the tendency for hi-tech, producer services and knowledge-intensive industries to locate in clusters at or near the top of the Canadian urban hierarchy (Coffey and Shearmur 1997;Gertler et al 2002;Shearmur and Doloreux 2007).…”

“…There are various ways to define the hi-tech sector, each related to different understandings of the fundamental nature of hi-tech activity, the relative importance of patterns of local and extra-local interaction, and the role of information and knowledge in the development process. As a practical matter, however, these definitions often converge when applied to the standard industrial classification schemes (Shearmur and Doloreux 2007). Given our interest in comparing the wages and earnings of two legally defined categories of workers, we wanted a definition for the hi-tech sector that would capture those doing similar work requiring similar skills and education regardless, in some sense, of where they fell in the available economic sector classification schemes.…”

“…Hi-tech economic activity, which is important for overall national economic growth, also tends to cluster geographically to take advantage of face-to-face contacts and other highly localized sources of global competitive advantage (Wolfe 2003). Often, but not always, these clusters of hi-tech activity are also found at or near the top of the urban hierarchy (Coffey and Shearmur 1997;Shearmur and Doloreux 2007). The selective geography of immigrant settlement and hi-tech clustering thus raise important questions for public policy related to the distribution of opportunity and activity across the Canadian urban system.…”

Knowledge-based service industry in a South African university town: The case of Stellenbosch

“…In this paper the term 'knowledge-based service industry' refers to a specialised subset of the service sector that provides services involving high-order complex intellectual and knowledge-intensive activities for which the dominant production input is skilled human capital (Shearmur & Doloreux, 2007). Daniels (1993) differentiates the more 'durable' services, such as those dealing with management and business consulting, computers and engineering, from the less knowledge-intensive, more 'perishable' services such as those dealing with security, office cleaning and deliveries.…”

“…This is particularly true of the knowledge-based service industry. Broadly defined, this industry is a specialised subset of the service sector that provides services involving complex intellectual and knowledge-intensive activities for which the dominant production input is skilled human capital (Aslesen & Jakobsen, 2007;Shearmur & Doloreux, 2007).…”