Regional Concentration of the Knowledge-based Economy in the EU: Towards a Renewed Oligocentric Model?

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the Knowledge-based Economy spatial distribution across the European Union (EU) regions (NUTS II), linking recent research approaches on innovation and structural change with approaches to regional economics. As a means of conducting this research, we classify economic activities according to six sectors based on their knowledge/technology intensity. Our results show that the higher the knowledge/technology content of the economic activity, the higher the concentration level of the activity. We find that some service activities (those considered knowledge intensive) have similar concentration levels to those operating in high or medium tech manufacturing. With regard to specialization, the most outstanding result is the strong presence of high and medium knowledge intensive service activities in metropolitan/capital regions. In general, our results reinforce the notion that an oligocentric model persists in Europe, with the southern German regions leading high and medium tech manufacturing, the south-east of England leading in high knowledge-intensive services, and with the mid-core model exemplified by the European metropolitan archipelago (particularly capital cities) in both northern and southern Europe.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank P. Cooke and two anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions. The authors are also indebted to Secretaría Xeral de I + D (Proxecto PGIDTI02CS20102PR) of the Galician Government for generous financial support.

Notes

1. As an example, in the 465 pages of Economics of Agglomeration edited by Fujita And Thisse (2002), services activities are mentioned only once. As an exception, see the recent paper published by Brülhart and Traeger (2005).

2. The trend of intense agglomeration in the “birth” phase may be interpreted either as the result of the creation and diffusion of new knowledge of critical importance (i.e. tacit knowledge), a result of potential economies of scale, or by the importance of spin-off phenomena from the beginning.

3. Certainly, not all knowledge intensive services demonstrate similar agglomeration and concentration patterns because, among other factors, the importance of clients'/users' proximity varies and because there are idiosyncratic service specificities (Vence & González, 2002).

4. See Appendix 1 for a description of each of these activities with a note on the data sources.

5. Please note that in order to calculate relative specialization indices we use the same equation (3) described earlier and named upon RSC _ik .

6. The missing data for this sector mainly affect the less developed regions which leads us to believe that the level of concentration of high-tech manufacturing is actually higher than the calculated indexes show.

7. We must point out that, as in the case of high-tech manufacturing, there is an important lack of data for medium-tech manufacturing—and data is most lacking from the less developed regions.