The Spanish economy has traditionally been characterized by a concentration of
economic activity in the two large metropolitan areas (Madrid and Barcelona), which in
1995 accounted for 35% of the total Gross Domestic Product. The rest of the
Mediterranean area is of secondary importance with a few exceptions, mainly Valencia
and Alicante, as is the Basque Country. One might add a few other provinces which
have also maintained a high level of growth (Zaragoza, Navarra and Seville) but the
rest of the country, with a few rare exceptions, does not possess a sufficiently high level
of economic activity to be worth mentioning.
‘HiDtech’ activities are concentrated in a few Spanish regions. In 1998, three out of
seventeen regions accounted for 63.6% of total Spanish R&D expenditures DMadrid
(30.9%), Catalonia (22.8%) and Andalucia (9.9%)D. The industrial innovative activities
are also spatially concentrated because three regions accounted for 58% of innovative
expenditures in the Spanish industry in 1997: Catalonia (25.3%), Madrid (22.4%) and
the Basque Country (10.3%). Regarding to the Spanish ‘hiDtech’ industries, all studies
evidence that the medical equipment industry has been one of them for the last fifteen
years (i.e. Giraldez 1988; Crespo and Velazquez 1999).
The European market share of the Spanish medical equipment industry in 1997 was
10,9% of consumption but only 5% of production or 3% of value added. The Spanish
market relies heavily on imports from Europe and the US because only half of the
Spanish market is supplied by firms located in Spain. An study of the Spanish foreign
trade revealed that Spanish imports of medical equipment overcomed exports in each
singular product in the period 1985∏1995 (Martinez and Urbina 1998). Table 1 shows
some descriptive statistics of the Spanish medical equipment industry in the 1993∏1998
period and its comparison to the whole Spanish industry.
This section of the paper deals with the degree of spatial concentration of economic and
innovative activities in the Spanish medical equipment industry. One straightforward
measure of economic concentration is the regional or local distribution of firms and
employment. Therefore, Table 2 indicates the provincial location of Spanish medical
equipment manufacturers in 1998, and as it can be observed, two provinces DBarcelona
and MadridD concentrated 76.7% of manufacturing firms and 79.5% of manufacturing