Regional Studies

Campi, Mercedes; Dueñas, Marco; Ciarli, Tommaso

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2210620pmid: N/A

Do creative industries have positive spillovers for the local economy in middle-income countries? While in high-income countries several studies have shown that creative industries are highly innovative and productive, positively impacting the local economy, the evidence is scarce for middle-income countries. Using employment data, we studied the agglomeration patterns of creative industries in Colombia between 2008 and 2017. We found a positive relationship between creative industries’ agglomeration and employment in non-creative services industries. However, using a shift–share instrumental variable approach, we found no significant causality of an increase in creative industries’ employment on employment growth in other industries.

Beaubrun-Diant, Kevin; Maury, Tristan-Pierre

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2237531pmid: N/A

This article sets out the first comprehensive analysis of income segregation in France across the whole urban–rural continuum. Segregation is broken down by urban areas, their size and the types of municipalities (central/suburban/exurban/rural). A significant part of the segregation is due to differences across urban areas. Moreover, regression analyses show that non-negligible levels of segregation are observed in small urban areas. Finally, disparities between exurban and central/suburban areas have increased sharply, particularly in small urban areas. These results suggest it is necessary to reconsider the view that segregation is limited to Paris, and they call for a new design of anti-segregation policies.

Maschke, Andreas

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2210605pmid: N/A

This paper assesses the extent to which German import competition has contributed to the observed differential decline in manufacturing employment across French regions. The study employs an exposure research design that exploits differences in regional manufacturing specialisation across French départements combined with an instrumental variable strategy. The analysis does not establish a connection between German import competition and differential changes in regional French manufacturing employment. This result suggests that German import competition has neither driven nor halted the overall decline of French manufacturing employment. It also indicates that the sizeable and long-lasting negative regional employment effects of trade between China and developed countries do not necessarily generalise.

Buyukyazici, Duygu; Mazzoni, Leonardo; Riccaboni, Massimo; Serti, Francesco

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2206868pmid: N/A

The literature unanimously agrees that industrial diversification is path dependent: new industries build on the pre-existing capabilities of regions that are partly embodied and reflected in the skills of the region’s workforce. This paper explicitly accounts for regional capabilities as workforce skills to build skill relatedness and skill complexity measures, that is, the skill-spaces, for 107 Italian regions for the period 2013–19. The data-driven techniques we use reveal that skill-spaces form two highly polarised clusters into social–cognitive and technical–physical skills. We find evidence that social–cognitive skills yield the highest probabilities of regional competitive advantage. A comparison with co-location-based measures shows that our measures are able to capture a substantial part of regional capabilities that cannot be measured with previous measures.

Ferraresi, Tommaso; Ghezzi, Leonardo; Vanni, Fabio; Caiani, Alessandro; Guerini, Mattia; Lamperti, Francesco; Reissl, Severin; Fagiolo, Giorgio; Napoletano, Mauro; Roventini, Andrea

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2189508pmid:

Nie, Xuanyi; Liu, Haijing

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2199780pmid: N/A

Concerning China’s growth in biotechnology, the research on biotech start-ups in China yields significant implications. However, studies have not given enough attention to hospitals, which are critical players in the biotech industry. Because of the hospital-centric healthcare system, public tertiary hospitals in China are important partners for biotech start-ups. This study investigates the geographical relationship between public tertiary hospitals and biotech start-ups in Chinese cities. The findings suggest evidence of collocation, which reflects their alliances. This research thereby contributes to the existing knowledge of the biotech industry by integrating the healthcare system into the location of biotech firms.

Breznitz, Dan; Buciuni, Giulio; Murphree, Michael

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2203705pmid: N/A

The rise of globally fragmented production since the 1980s encouraged economic regions to specialise in narrow slices of the value chain, making the benefits from local agglomeration no longer certain. Nonetheless, locally integrated production districts continue to thrive. Locally integrated industrial districts have proven sustainable in times of both increasing and decreasing fragmentation of production. Drawing upon insights from three schools – the Markusian logic of multiple district models, strategic coupling and the production of semi-public goods – this article uses a two-staged case-study design to explore the conditions under which locally integrated production districts continue to thrive in the global economy.

Ji, Peng; Yuan, Lilin

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2229374pmid: N/A

Under dual market and policy forces, industries vacated central business districts in Chinese cities, showing a decentralised layout. Using Chinese industrial firms’ micro-data (2004–12), with township-level division as the unit, we describe urban industrial decentralisation and polycentric layout, exploring their impact on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP). We found that: (1) industrial decentralisation negatively impacted TFP during the early and middle stages of urbanisation; (2) the polycentric layout can alleviate the firms’ TFP losses caused by decentralisation; and (3) industrial decentralisation reduces diversified agglomeration, lowering TFP. The conclusions of this study provide policy recommendations for urban industrial spatial planning.

Daunfeldt, Sven-Olov; Mihaescu, Oana; Rudholm, Niklas

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2228353pmid: N/A

Business improvement districts (BIDs) have emerged as possible solutions for the revitalisation of declining urban areas. We investigate the effects of a voluntary Swedish BID programme on firm performance, urban safety and property values in five small to medium-sized Swedish towns, and find that it increased labour productivity for incumbent firms within the BID by about 7%, mainly through an increase in revenues. However, the positive effect of the BID programme on firm performance is transitory, decreasing sharply during the third year after implementation and then becoming insignificant. As for urban safety and property values, the results are mostly insignificant.

Anguelov, Dimitar; Peck, Jamie; Zhang, Jun; Su, Xing

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2242381pmid: N/A

During China’s reform era, dominant narratives described a transition away from centralised planning in favour of mutually reinforcing processes of liberalisation and decentralisation. Under Xi Jinping, the talk has increasingly been of the recentralisation of authoritarian-state powers and party discipline. Questioning both reform-era transition narratives and equally simplifying claims about their recent reversal, the paper argues for an enriched treatment of party–state spatiality, understood as a polymorphic and multi-scalar process, rather than simply a more complex one. In the emergent Greater Bay Area megaregion, ‘new era’ zoning strategies are being repurposed as drivers of pathfinding reforms animated by the party–state, in contrast to received readings of zones as single-purpose instruments of liberalisation.