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

From an empirical point of view we are convinced that the analysis of business groups
can be very fruitful for providing better insights into the relationships between spatial
agglomeration and firm’s organizational forms.

Notes

¹ From now on we will use the term ‘business cluster’ as a general label for the various forms of spatial
agglomeration of firms. The term ‘industrial district’ will be used to refer to the particular form of business
cluster prevailing in Italy, which is characterized by the importance of small firms, the high level of
specialization along the production chain and the prevalence of traditional sectors.

² Dei Ottati (1996a) refers to industrial districts in Tuscany. Balloni and Iacobucci (1997) analyse industrial
districts in the Marche region. Brioschi et al. (2002) analyse industrial districts in Emilia Romagna.

³ Varaldo & Ferrucci (2004) analyse the evolution of some institutional features of district firms (like,
ownership, management structure, etc.). However, they do not relate such features to the specific
characteristics of business clustering.

⁴ Theoretical models of the evolution of business clusters have concentrated on the conditions that explain
the presence and absolute size of clusters rather than on their internal organization (see Maggioni (2004) for
an application of these models to industrial districts). As mentioned in the introduction, these models
normally assume homogeneity in the firms forming the cluster.

⁵ We eliminated all the groups composed of just two companies, one of which is a financial or a property
company. We considered these groups as ‘pseudo-groups’.

⁶ This result is robust to different definitions of the sector. It also holds defining the sector on the basis of a
two-digit and a three-digit code.

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