The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and to what extent European manufacturing location has been driven by regional localisation or national comparative advantages during the period 1985-2001. To this end, the relative concentration pattern of each industry is disentangled into within and between country components. The original methodology adopted is based on the use of the Theil dissimilarity entropy index allowing to handle two geographical levels of analysis. The evidence suggests that the agglomeration of manufacturing industries is more likely to find expression between the internal regions of each country rather than across countries. Counterintuitively, after the completion of the Single European Market the relevance of national border remains stable or even increase in the localisation of the majority of the sectors considered.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Universita' Politecnica delle Marche (I), Dipartimento di Economia in its series Working Papers with number
247.