STUDY ON THE CHARACTERISTIC OF SPATIAL AGGLOMERATION OF THE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIAL CLUSTERS IN JIANGSU PROVINCE

Recently, industrial cluster has become the hot topic in Chinese regional studies and the new idea of the government officials in regional and industrial development. One interest and controversial question is to what extent of the geographic scope the industrial cluster agglomerates. In this paper, using principle component analysis(PCA), several manufacturing industrial clusters in Jiangsu province is identificated firstly. Then, based on the firm data, the Ellison-Glaeser(1997) indices of agglomeration and co-agglomeration are employed to study the agglomeration characteristic of geographic scope of the 5 representative manufacturing industrial clusters. Whereas agglomeration reflects the extent to which firms in the same industry locate near each other, co-agglomeration reflects the extent to which firms in different industries locate near each other. Allowing comparisons of agglomeration and co-agglomeration at different levels of geography, the geographic scope agglomeration and the spillovers of manufacturing industrial cluster can be detected. The result shows that geographic scope agglomeration of steel and machine industrial cluster, petroleum and chemicals industrial cluster and automobile manufacturing industrial cluster stride over the boundary of county obviously and reach the city region, the firms of electronic and communications equipment industrial cluster agglomerate at both county and city level, and the firms of plumule textile and apparel industrial cluster agglomerate only in county geographic scope. The result also shows that among the 5 representative manufacturing industrial clusters, the electronic and Communications equipment industrial cluster has the highest indices of intra-industry agglomeration and inter-industry agglomeration, which indicates that the highest spillovers in the industrial cluster.