International Regional Science Review

Korea has pursued a cluster-based policy to increase industrial competitiveness and to alleviate development gaps between the regions. However, local governments have often oversupplied clusters without an objective examination of the demands and conditions in the regions. Based on these concerns, this study analyses effects and interdependencies of factors related to regional innovation and growth in Korea. Employing a PCA method and a GLS regression models on panel data, we generated three composite factors, social, capacity, and clustering, and estimated their effects on regional economic performance. The results show that it is important to have a favorable socio-economic setting to foster growth by clusters. In addition, cluster-based policies may have weaker effects than expected, because the effect of R&D capacity on regional growth was stronger and longer lasting. Finally, some specific elements that most affected economic growth in Korea’s regions are identified. The overall results indicate favorable environments should be established beforehand to foster regional growth with clusters, which confirms “jobs follow people.”

From the perspective of city-transport system, this article applies space syntax to analyze the physical integration of cities. Traditionally, space syntax is mainly applied to urban areas, buildings, and other scales. However, when space syntax is applied to the configuration analysis of urban agglomeration, the change of scale causes changes in spatial perception and human behavioral patterns. Thus, we present a new method of space syntax. This method defines the lane and track between entrance and exit, and city as node, which represents small-scale space. Infrastructure, such as stations, entrances, and exits, are defined as links. The urban agglomeration is thus transformed into a topological network, and then displayed as a bipartite graph of cities and routes. We take the urban agglomerations in the Yangtze River Middle Reaches (YRMR) as the case study area and analyze its spatial configuration from the perspectives of local and integral, interfaces at different scales, gaps, evolution of the dual foreground and background networks, and evolution of the transport networks. The results reveal the way cities integrate with each other and further reveal the multi-scale spatial structure of urban agglomeration.

Business location research often focuses on evaluating specific policies or explaining outcomes for a particular region. Further, the micro-foundations of random profit maximization supporting manufacturing location analysis often lack the intuitive nature of demand thresholds. While this article maintains these micro-foundations, it introduces a unifying concept of profit pools and examines how proximate supply/cost factors determine potential local manufacturing size. The approach avoids a number of limitations associated with other locational choice models. Restricted-access establishment-level data from the Longitudinal Business Database along with secondary data sources produce a model to estimate county-level contributors to outcomes of manufacturing establishment growth and consolidation. The analysis offers improved methods and accuracy for modeling establishment location outcomes, including accuracy in measuring industry size and methods for choosing among various count data distributions. The locational factors associated with county-level potential for manufacturing vary in magnitude and significance depending on the type of manufacturing, while affirming the importance of agglomeration across manufacturing types.

We use the entry of 17 external shopping malls in Sweden to investigate how they have affected the performance of incumbent firms located in the city centres of small cities. Estimating a traditional fixed effects regression model while controlling for firm-specific heterogeneity, we find that entry by external shopping malls decreased the labour productivity of incumbent firms in city centres by 5.31%. Revenues decrease by 6.62%, while the reduction in the number of employees (0.45%) is small and not significantly different from zero. However, using time-specific fixed effects to control for common time trends in retailing in small cities, we find that the impact on labour productivity, revenues and the number of employees due to the entry of external shopping malls becomes insignificant. Thus, incumbent firms in small cities have a negative development path mainly due to long-term economic trends, possibly because of the combination of urbanization effects and a lack of local investments.