The Emergence of New Industries at the Regional Level in S pain: A Proximity Approach Based on Product Relatedness

Ron Boschma (), Asier Minondo () and Mikel Navarro

Economic Geography, 2013, vol. 89, issue 1, 29-51

Abstract: How do regions diversify over time? Inspired by recent studies, we argue that regions diversify into industries that make use of capabilities in which regions are specialized. Since the spread of capabilities occurs through mechanisms that have a strong regional bias, we expect that capabilities that are available at the regional level play a larger role than do capabilities that are available at the country level for the development of new industries. To test this hypothesis, we analyze the emergence of new industries in 50 S panish regions at the NUTS 3 level in the period 1988–2008. We calculate the capability-distance between new export products and existing export products in S panish regions and provide econometric evidence that regions tend to diversify into new industries that use similar capabilities as existing industries in these regions. We show that proximity to the regional industrial structure plays a much larger role in the emergence of new industries in regions than does proximity to the national industrial structure. This finding suggests that capabilities at the regional level enable the development of new industries.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (214)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2012.01170.x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: The Emergence of New Industries at the Regional Level in S pain: A Proximity Approach Based on Product Relatedness (2013)
Working Paper: The emergence of new industries at the regional level in Spain. A proximity approach based on product-relatedness (2012)
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:taf:recgxx:v:89:y:2013:i:1:p:29-51

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/recg20

DOI: 10.1111/j.1944-8287.2012.01170.x

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Geography is currently edited by James Murphy

More articles in Economic Geography from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().