Persistence and Change of Regional Industrial Activities – The Impact of Diversification in the German Machine Tool Industry

Dirk Fornahl () and Christina Guenther ()

Papers on Economics and Evolution from Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography

Abstract: The paper Investigates stability and change of regional economic activities in the long-run. As the unit of analysis we selected the machine tool industry in West Germany for the years 1953 to 2002. We spot a strong variance in the activities between the different regions. These differences are relatively stable over time and the regional activities are rather path-dependent. Nevertheless, the paper also identifies changes in the level of activities. As the main driving factors for these changes we examine the effect of regional diversification strategies. We find that those regions pursuing a general diversification strategy have a higher likelihood to grow than regions which are specialising. Furthermore, diversification into totally new technological and product fields is only beneficial under specific circumstances based on technological and market developments. Hence, in most cases a broad diversification is superior to one focusing on new state-of-the-art technological fields.

Keywords: Geographic concentration; specialisation indices; machine tool industry; path-dependencies; agglomeration economies Length 29 pages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L61 O1 O18 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse and nep-geo
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esi:evopap:2008-16

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers on Economics and Evolution from Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography Deutschhausstrasse 10, 35032 Marburg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christoph Mengs ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).