Pascal Le Floc'h (p)

Michael Fritsch

The issue of industrial concentration is an object of study in the manufacturing sector, observed from long-term statistical series (Dumais et al., 2002; Kim, 1995). In fact, the spatial concentration of firms linked to the same industry, a horizontal concentration, is a structural variable.
The location strategies of firms, driven by differences in the price of production or differences in production costs between regions, modify the spatial distribution of industrial activities. Other factors favor these displacements such as the sources of supply or the quality of environmental factors. Consequently, concentration also appears in a vertical dimension, with dependent companies through a supplier-client relationship.
The marine fishing industry is not immune to these capital movements. The analysis of the spatial location of fishing fleets located upstream of the industry is possible from landing sites registered by the State or decentralized public agencies as a statistical recording point of production. Only few studies exist on this issue with empirical research in fisheries (Hannesson, 2007).
The statistical series of productions from marine fisheries rarely have a historical depth of more than fifty years. Yet, historical reports provide new insights into the diversity of trajectories followed by fishermen communities. Faced with a collapse in production, some communities are successfully converting to other industrial activities, while others resist hoping for a return to previous levels.
We seek to understand the survival of some communities and the disappearance of others over a long period of more than a century. The historical study shows that the specialization strategy of some communities does not necessarily reflect an inability to adapt. Should we then consider that the historical persistence of a population of entrepreneurs staying in the same industry, at a localized territorial level, reveals a high degree of social resilience incompatible with innovative behaviour?
Conceptual research on socio-systems (Holling, 2001) indicates that change occurs only during periods of high vulnerability (eg the sudden collapse of an exploited natural resource stock) and therefore low resilience. The case examined in this article, geographic location of fishing ports for the sardine industry, shed new light on the historical survival of communities with high resilience.
In

Maria Kristalova (p), Michael Fritsch , Michael Wyrwich

Michael Fritsch

We study inter-regional persistence and change of entrepreneurship and innovation activities in Germany in the 1907-2015 period. We employ a unique data set on self-employment and start-up rates as well as historical patents at a regional level throughout the last century and beyond. Preliminary results are ambiguous and underpin a stability hypothesis on the one hand, and a change hypothesis on the other hand. We observe a strong path dependency of regional levels of new business formation in some regions, whereas there is pronounced rank mobility of others. We also exploit the division of Germany into two different states after World War II and the re-unification more than 40 years later as a natural experiment and investigate the impact of the different political regimes on persistence and change in the levels of regional entrepreneurship and innovation. Using a regional League Table (LT) and a difference-in-difference (DiD) approach, we are also able to quantify the long-run role of the socialist legacy in today’s divergence of the regional economic performance.
Our results show that the socialism treatment effect is not as significant as the public debate often suggests. Instead, we find that the share of manufacturing employment, physical proximity to centers of and R&D activities prior to World War II are more effective in the long run and socialism may just have fell on the fruitful ground. The results help to a better understanding of why some regions nowadays fall so strongly behind others.

Michael Wyrwich (p), Petrik Runst

Michael Fritsch

This paper assesses the role of natural conditions for the emergence of regional industry structures and entrepreneurship. There is a lack of research on the role of natural conditions for the emergence of entrepreneurship and regional specialization. The paper shows that certain soil characteristics have a positive impact of the degree of industrialization, the share of crafts businesses, and the rate of entrepreneurship in the early 20th century. There is also a persistent effect on current regional specialization and entrepreneurship. Altogether, the paper demonstrates that current economic structures have historical roots in geography. Such historical roots can severely impede the possibilities and the effectiveness of policy. Hence, understanding such historical roots is highly important for any policy that aims at improving regional performance.