Industrial Clusters: Equilibrium, Welfare and Policy

Anthony Venables and Victor D Norman

No 3004, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This Paper studies the size and number of industrial clusters that will arise in a multi-country world in which, because of increasing returns to scale, one sector has a propensity to cluster. It compares the equilibrium with the world welfare maximum, showing that the equilibrium will generally have clusters that are too small, while there are possibly too many countries with a cluster. Allowing national governments to subsidize will move the equilibrium to the world welfare maximum, so there is no ?race to the bottom?. If subsidy rates were capped then there would be a proliferation of too many and too small clusters.

Keywords: Clusters; Trade; Increasing returns; Industrial policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP3004 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

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:cpr:ceprdp:3004

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP3004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().