The Role of Space in the Creation of Knowledge in Austria: An Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis

The relationship between knowledge spillovers and space is extremely complex and, at the current state of research, only partially understood. This is partly due to the fact that knowledge spillovers are difficult to measure. The chapter makes a modest attempt to shed some light on the role of space in the creation of technological knowledge in Austria. The study is exploratory rather than explanatory in nature and based on descriptive and exploratory techniques such as Moran’s I test for spatial autocorrelation and the Moran scatterplot. Clusters of the output of the knowledge creation process (measured in terms of patent counts) are compared with spatial concentration patterns of two input measures of knowledge production: private R&D and academic research. In addition, employment in manufacturing is considered to capture agglomeration economies. The analysis is based on data aggregated for two-digit ISIC industries and at the level of Austrian political districts. It explores the extent to which knowledge spillovers are mediated by spatial proximity in Austria. A time-space comparison makes it possible to study whether divergence or convergence processes in knowledge creation have occurred in the past two decades. As in the case of any exploratory data analysis, the findings need to be treated with caution and should be viewed only as an initial pre-modelling stage for Chapter 11.