The role of cultural amenities in cities for employment growth of industrial clusters: evidence from a panel VAR model

ABSTRACT

Industrial clusters are critical economic drivers of city growth, and this study suggests strategies for increasing employment in clusters experiencing a lack of employees. Cities have an important role in industrial clusters because they serve employees’ needs that industrial districts cannot provide for, yet this relationship has not received sufficient attention. Therefore, this study investigates the interrelationships between clusters and their city settlement characteristics, and specifically how the latter characteristics influence one another to lead to cluster employment growth. This study expands on ideas about the role of cultural amenities for industrial clusters that lack sufficient accessibility. It uses panel vector autoregressive methodology to investigate 706 industrial clusters and their 160 cities in South Korea over 10 consecutive years. Cultural amenities can act as a starting point linked to cluster employment growth, prompting the building of other amenities. They also influence the influx of additional facilities to cities, with their overall quality upgraded, resulting in regions with rich amenities.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural amenities
• settlement characteristics
• industrial clusters
• employment growth
• panel VAR

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Korea Agency for Infrastructure Technology Advancement (KAIA) grant funded by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (Grant KAIA001434041G0003186). This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (2020R1A2C4002751).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Korea Agency for Infrastructure Technology Advancement (KAIA) grant funded by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport [grant number: RS-2023-00242291]; National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) [grant number: RS-2024-00359695].