Program and Maps

Program and Maps

要旨：The effort to lower the space barriers is in the core of what we call economic development, industrial structure transformation, and technological innovation like steam engine, motorcar, radio, TV, telephone, mobile phone etc. Owning and consuming them is not the ultimate purpose they serve. They exist to be used to spatially move human beings, commodities, or information. Human activities to lower spatial barriers, which macro-economics is apt to ignore, are nothing else than the dynamic process of economic development itself. To acquire a limited number and quantity of goods and services, we need to mobilize a set of space overcoming system.

要旨：This paper analyzes empirically the effect of spatial agglomeration of activities on the productivity of firms using French individual firm data from 1996 to 2004. This allows us to control for endogeneity biases that the estimation of agglomeration economies typically encounters. French firms benefit from localization economies, but not from urbanization economies nor from competition effects. The benefits generated by increased sectoral clustering, though positive and highly significant are modest and geographically very limited. The gains from clusters are also quite well internalized by firms in their location choice: we find very little difference between the geography that would maximize productivity gains and the geography actually observed.