Clusters: Myth or realistic ambition for policy-makers?

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Henry Overman, Lauren Phillips, Sotiria Theodoropoulou, the editor of Local Economy and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.

Notes

Some interesting definitions are offered by Porter (1998b, 2000, p. 15), Van den Berg et al. (2001, p. 187), Rosenfeld (1997, p. 4) or Swan & Prevezer (1996, p. 139).

For details on the role of productivity in explaining the relationship between increasing returns to scale and economic growth, see Fingleton & McCombie (1998, pp. 89–102).

The specialisation created by clusters is often presented as just positive, but too much specialisation damages the local economy, whereas city diversity helps employment growth (Glaeser et al., 1992).

Porter defines ‘social embeddedness’ as the existence of facilitative social networks and social capital (Porter, 1998c). Granovetter defines an ‘embedded market’ as one in which economic and social exchange are intermingled (Granovetter, 1985).

Some of the most famous examples are Baden Würtemberg, the Basque Country and Emilia Romagna (Cooke & Morgan, 1998; Castells & Hall, 1994), Santa Croce in Italy (Amin & Thrift, 1992), Wales (Lovering, 1999; Cooke & Morgan, 1998), Cambridge (Castells & Hall, 1994), the case of high tech and electronics in California (Scott, 1993), textiles in northern Italy (Piore & Sabel, 1984), financial services in London (Gordon & McCann, 2000; Amin & Thrift, 1992) or New York, biotechnology and software in Boston or Silicon Valley.