Spatial agglomeration and business groups: new evidence from Italian industrial districts

5. Conclusions

The main aim of this paper was to provide a preliminary analysis of the relationship
between business clustering and firms’ organizational structures.

Despite the importance of this issue for understanding the evolution of business
clusters, and industrial districts in particular, very few theoretical and empirical studies have
so far addressed the subject. This is partly because of difficulty in obtaining the necessary
data. Our work is mainly empirical. We have taken advantage of a large dataset recently
elaborated by ISTAT (the Italian national statistics agency) containing information about
Italian business groups.

The analysis of business groups is specifically interesting for the aim of this study
because business groups can be considered as a specific observed form of firms’
organization. Specifically, data on business groups allow us to observe the degree of
diversification of controlled activities and the spatial location of the same activities.

The review of the literature on the issue allowed us to set a few general propositions
about the relationship between the presence and characteristics of business groups and
their belonging or not to a specialized cluster (in our case an industrial district). In
particular we tried to verify three main hypotheses: i) that the presence of business groups
is more widespread in industrial districts than in non-district areas; ii) that business groups
located in industrial districts are less diversified than groups outside industrial districts; c)
that groups in industrial districts should show a higher degree of spatial concentration than
groups outside industrial districts.

The first two hypotheses are confirmed by the empirical analysis, while the third is only
verified for the case of industrial districts operating in the textile and clothing sector. The
latter finding does not come as a surprise because, as the literature on industrial district
suggests, agglomerative forces seem to play a major and more intense role within these
‘traditional’ clusters.

Being a preliminary study on the issue it has several drawbacks that give space for
further development of the analysis both at theoretical and empirical level. At a theoretical
level we need to develop a general model of the relationship between business clustering
and firms’ organizational forms. This model should take into account the evolutionary
pattern of business clusters and the role played by the learning process of firms belonging
to the clusters.

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