Richard Harris , John Moffat (p)

The UK economy is one of the most regionally imbalanced in Europe. The government’s recent industrial strategy discusses various means of addressing this, one of which is the strengthening of existing clusters. This accords with the widely-held view that, in order to survive in high wage locations, manufacturing firms need to form localised groupings – variously described as ‘clusters’, ‘ecosystems’ or ‘industrial commons’ – that provide access to skilled labour markets, specialised suppliers and knowledge spill-overs. Most of the extant empirical evidence on clusters in Britain has used measures of clustering that suffer from areal unit, aggregation and/or checkerboard problems. This paper investigates the evolution of spatial clustering among plants in British manufacturing over thirty years using data from the Office for National Statistics’ Annual Business Survey. Indices of proximity to other plants are calculated at different levels of the standard industrial classification for each plant using their postcode district (of which there are almost 3,000 in Great Britain). Distances are measured using both geodetic distances and travel times. This allows us to provide a comprehensive picture of whether deindustrialisation has eroded manufacturing clusters in traditional industrial regions or whether there are resilient clusters of plants that place-based industrial policies may be able to further support and develop.

Ioannis Baraklianos (p), Louafi Bouzouina (p), Ouassim Manout, Patrick Bonnel

Accessibility is one of the most important attributes for a location choice of an economic establishment. However, even though it seems intuitive, there are no distinction in the literature between creations and relocations regarding the influence of accessibility. To our knowledge, few works have compared the location choices of new and relocating establishments. Duranton and Puga (2001) studied the differences in preferences for specialisation or diversity, Manjón-Antolín and Arauzo-Carod (2011) studied the creations and relocations of manufacturing plants with no interest on accessibility and Holl (2004a) focuses on manufacturing sector with an interest for accessibility. In this paper, we are willing to take a step forward and give some empirical evidence on the difference of the effect of accessibility between new and migrated economic establishments for various economic sectors. Thus, the main contribution of the article is empirical.
We estimate discrete choice models (MNL) using data of more than 43 000 creations and 11 000 relocations, occurred during 2005-2011, from eight different sectors in the Lyon urban area in France. The main data source is the register of economic establishments (SIRENE database) which is a disaggregated database that contains all the companies in France and is provided by the INSEE. This database is enriched by other databases from various sources (census, modelled data of the laboratory, land values etc).
The results are demonstrating that in fact the effect of the accessibility between new and relocating establishments in the same sector differs. We can classify the economic sectors in three groups based on the differences for accessibility. In the first group, we have the high order services. Migrating establishments of this group are searching for better accessibility in general. In the second group, we have the sectors of Manufacturing, Construction, Wholesale and Back Office. Migrating establishments of these sectors, in comparison to creations, are searching for areas with better transportation infrastructure but lower accessibility to population in cheaper zones. Last, we have two uncategorised sectors, Retail and Health.
These results are important from a policy perspective. The investments on transportation projects are very costly and evidence from this paper shows that local authorities should take into consideration the distinction, not only between economic sectors but between creations and relocations as well. During the economic evaluation of their projects, public authorities should adapt their new policies/projects depending on their objectives (new firms or densification).

Igone Porto Gomez (p)

According to the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, VTC is defined as Beducation and training which aims to equip people with knowledge, know-how, skills and/or competences required in particular occupations or more broadly on the labour market^ (CEDEFOP 2014: 292). Unlike such organizations as universities, public research centres, technology centres or even knowledge-intensive business services, VTC have barely attracted the attention of scholarly work within the literature on innovation studies, even though these are theoretically recognized to be an unquestionable element of innovation systems (Lane 1990; Lam and Lundvall 2006; Noelke andHorn 2014). One of the reasons for this lack of conceptual and empirical studies might be the reductionist view of innovation and competence building that prevails in many analyses (Navarro Arancegui 2014).The aim of this paper is to analyze the role of vocational training centers as the core elements of a local innovation system. Vocational training centers are seldom regarded as key players in knowledge generation and dissemination processes by the innovation systems literature. This stream of the literature does not provide a conclusive evidence of their influence, so their role still remains neglected and under studied. The most important player of an innovation system is the productive subsystem, this is, the firms. In order to identify the most important players for those firms, in technological innovation process we ask local firms in a NUTS2 Spanish region about their opinion about the actors they collaborate with. The goal of this work is to analyse whether vocational training centres are indeed relevant agents in the articulation, knowledge exchange and dissemination of a local innovation system.

Laura Resmini (p), Luca Bettarelli

When transnational firms decide to cross national borders, they mainly operate according to private cost-benefit calculations. However, they also contribute to forging inter-city interactions that may extensively affect the economic system of places where firms locate. Under this hypothesis, this paper empirically investigates if and how participation in transnational networks affects the ability of local municipalities to react and contrast adverse economic conditions. Accordingly, we build a unique dataset that focuses on economic performance of Italian municipalities (at nuts-3 level) in the last decade and maps networks by means of inward and outward localization strategies of national and international firms. Our dataset allows us to control for a number of network’ dimensions such as intensity, geographical dispersion (national and international networks), sectoral specialization (related and unrelated variety) and technological intensity. In detail, the paper aims to address the following questions: do local economies benefit from being connected to networks? If yes, which network’s dimensions help local economies to contrast economic shocks? Results allow us to disclose relevant elements characterizing network externalities, thus contributing to the growing body of empirical literature on urban networks. Therefore, the paper provides novel insights to the ongoing debate aimed at identifying efficient measures to sustain local economies in times of crisis.