Keywords
Cluster, Location, Functional Region, Knowledge, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Cluster Policy
JEL CODE: R12, R58
CHAPTER 1: Introduction
This paper presents a comprehensive overview of research on economic clusters and would hopefully be of interest to scholars as well practitioners involved in cluster formation and cluster management. Clusters and clustering has caught the imagination of scholars and policy makers as well as business people. A general search on Google in October 2006 on the concept cluster gave about 116 million hits. An unrestricted search on Google Scholar gave about 1,550,000 hits, while a search restricted to economic and social sciences gave about 206,000 hits. These results clearly illustrate the great general scientific interest in clusters and clustering. The interest in clusters and clustering among researchers in economics and related subjects is also increasing
rapidly. Using EconLit of October 2006, we find three hits for clusters in 1969 but 146 hits for clusters in 2005.
The study of clusters and clustering and related subjects are now an integral part of many undergraduate and postgraduate studies in business administration, economics, economic geography, and urban and regional planning. At the policy level governments at central, regional, and local levels in most developed countries have conducted cluster studies and introduced policies aiming at supporting existing clusters as well stimulating the emergence of new clusters. The success of these policies has varied substantially but cluster policies seem to have become an integral part of the political thinking on industrial and regional policies. International organisations, such as the OECD, have conducted major cluster studies to support the
development of cluster policies (Malmberg & Maskell, 2002).
The growing intell原文请找腾讯752018766辣,文-论'文.网http://www.751com.cn ectual as well as political interest for clusters and clustering is the primemotivation for this paper. The current large interest in clustering and agglomeration is a culmination of a research tradition that goes back to the 19th century and that is associated with names such as von Thünen, Marshall, Weber, Ohlin, Hoover, Cristaller, Palander, Lösch, Isard and Beckmann. Even if both economists and economic geographers have contributed to the field it has been mainly economic geographers that have kept the research tradition running. Mainstream economists have largely ignored spatial issues until the early 1990s, when Krugman
(1991) suddenly seemed to realise that the most striking feature of the geography of economic activity was concentration – a problem analyzed by Hotelling (1931), Christaller (1933), and Lösch (1943). However, since then also a growing number of non-spatial economists have started to pay in interest into what has become known as “New Economic Geography”.1 Fujita, Krugman & Venables (1999) explain the increased theoretical and empirical interest among economists for where economic activities take place and why they concentrate in space. Their major explanation
is that has to do with its importance for core areas in economics such as urban economics, location theory, and international trade theory.
What is an industrial cluster and what do different researchers imply when using the concept? Despite substantial research on clusters, there is still much confusion concerning the proper conceptualization of a cluster, except that it is generally conceived as a non-random spatial concentration of economic activities (Ellison & Glaeser, 1997). Gordon and McCann (2000) have offered some help by providing a comprehensive assessment of various theoretical frameworks in which industrial clusters have been analyzed. They have observed that the phenomenon of industrial clustering has attracted researchers from several disciplines and research traditions
employing a diverse set of theoretical frameworks and analytical approaches. Varieties of conflicting conceptualisations have been used, which has generated ambiguity. Concepts such as agglomeration, cluster, industrial district, regional economic milieu, and industrial complex have been used more or less interchangeably with often very little concern about how to make them operational. Gordon & McCann identify three analytically distinct forms of spatial industrial clustering, each of them subject to logic of its own:
•The classical model of pure agglomeration, referring to job matching opportunities and service economies of scale and scope, where externalities arise via the local market and local spillovers.
•The industrial-complex model, referring to explicit links of sales and purchases between firms leading to reduced transaction costs.
•The club model, also referred to as the social-network model, which focuses on social ties and trust facilitating cooperation and innovation.