The growing interest on the economic geography issues has provided new vigour to the research efforts aiming at explaining economic phenomena without neglecting space. In particular several studies have focused on the role of spatially bounded externalities on firms agglomeration processes at the local industry level. This paper has a twofold objective. Firstly, we outline a general eclectic model of local economic growth to provide the theoretical background to guide the econometric analysis. The model includes a general taxonomy of different factors which may explain economic growth in a specific industry and location. Secondly, we assess the role of a large set of potential determinants of the process of local agglomeration of economic activity and we address the issue of spatial association of the local growth processes. We apply our model to the case of Italy making use of a very ample database on socio-economic indicators for 784 Local Labour Systems and 97 manufacturing sectors over the period 1991-96. Our econometric results show that local growth in Italy is not a homogeneous process. On the contrary, it is characterized by significant differences across macro regions with respect to the relevance of the explanatory factors. Among the most important determinants of local industry growth, it is worth mentioning the positive role of the diversity externalities. We also find robust evidence of the negative influence of specialisation externalities on labour dynamics at the local industry level. Moreover, we have assessed the effects of other determinants of local growth like: human capital, social environment and public infrastructures. The analysis of spatial dynamics, carried out for the North-East and Centre-North, shows that at the local industry level there are polarisation phenomena at work and that employment dynamics are self-contained within the boundaries of local labour systems once we have controlled for a large set of local determinants.
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 Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia in its series Working Paper CRENoS with number
200113.
Find related papers by JEL classification: R11 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Analysis of Growth, Development, and Changes R12 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography) L60 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - General O52 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Europe
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)