Creative industries agglomeration and entrepreneurship in China: necessity or opportunity?

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to address the question of how the type of agglomeration externalities impacts on the type of entrepreneurship at the regional level. Using China’s provincial panel data from 2003 to 2015, we employ the Generalised Moment Method to test the role of regional specialisation and geographic concentration in necessity-driven and/or opportunity-driven entrepreneurship. In general, the empirical results show that entrepreneurial activities motivated by opportunity, rather than by necessity, tend to be higher in a more specialised or more concentrated area in the context of creative industries. The results are basically consistent and robust by regressions within different groups of creative sectors. The paper is helpful in examining the channels by which entrepreneurial activities can be stimulated by industries clustering strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative industries
• entrepreneurship
• agglomeration economics
• regional specialisation
• geographic concentration

JEL CODES:

• R1
• O14

Acknowledgment

The author wants to thank the reviewers and financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71503109) and the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province in China (2017J01516).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71503109) and the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province in China (2017J01516).