Progress in Industrial Agglomeration Research

The geographical clustering of manufacturing employments and establishments is pervasive.Companies and plants are not distributed uniformly in space,but rather agglomerate in some places.Industrial agglomeration has been a popular economic phenomenon all over the world and has been paid a lot of attentions to by scholars and government's officials.Industrial agglomeration is one of the main issues of economic geography,regional economics and other related disciplines.In this paper,the progress of theories and empirical studies in industrial agglomeration research is reviewed.Marshall has pointed at three types of externalities: labor pooling,intermediate inputs and knowledge spillovers.Classical and neoclassical location theories emphasize the role of transportation costs,labor costs and demands in promoting industrial agglomeration.Neoclassical trade theories stress technology or resource endowments and comparative advantages.In new economic geography models,the distribution of economic activities is driven by the interaction of transportation costs and scale economies.Empirical studies on industrial agglomeration confirm that a variety of significant variables,including factor endowments,external economies,scale economies,transportation costs,market demands and other non-economic factors,influence the formation of industrial agglomeration.