Economias de aglomeracion en la industria

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing applied research on the role of external economies in the location of manufacturing activities. The fist section of the paper reviews a part of the traditional and recent literature on the nature and typologies of externalities that may influence industrial location in the absence of trade barriers, or other kind of barriers, to the gree movement of productive factors, inputs or outputs. It shows the dispersion of approaches within the relevant literature, and how those new approaches that model market structre using the paradigm of monopolistic competition may help to improve the understanding of the nature and role of agglomerative forces in production. The second part of the paper consists on the estimation of an econometric location model based on the presence of technological external economies of two types: local own industry concentration, and local productive diversity. The estimation uses employment data of a set of manufacturing sectors in fifty Spanish provinces; and the fist provisional results confirm the hypothesis that external economies are relevant in the geographical location of industry.