Search

Targeting industry clusters for economic development has become popular despite the lack of empirical evidence about the spatial scales over which various clusters agglomerate. This paper identifies twenty manufacturing industry clusters from a principal components analysis of interindustry patterns of trade and measures the spatial employment concentration of each cluster's plants within a polycentric framework. Two to eight centers of employment concentration are detected within the Southern California region for each set of trade linkages. Our spatial half-life measure reveals that half of a cluster's employment in associated establishments is located within a typical range of eight to twelve kilometers (about 5–7.5 miles) to the nearest employment center or subcenter for the particular cluster. Furthermore, employment in seventeen of the twenty clusters is found to be more spatially concentrated than manufacturing employment as a whole, suggesting that geographic proximity is important to interindustry linkages in the Southern California economy. More important, the spatial concentration across industry clusters varies considerably within the metropolitan area, implying that economic development practitioners should consider local context and adapt industry cluster theories to the specific advantages and disadvantages of their immediate locality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Because support for entrepreneurship is often a core part of economic development strategies, we investigate whether it is important for growth in lagging, rural U.S. regions by focusing on Appalachia. While entrepreneurship has the advantage of being endogenous and 'home grown,' previous research suggests that remote rural regions may lack the agglomeration economies to benefit greatly from entrepreneurship. Using county-level data, we explore the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth, employing self-employment and small business data as proxies for entrepreneurship. We look at the results for the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) region, using its immediate Appalachian neighbors outside the ARC region as a control group. Moreover, we also account for self-sorting by proprietors to locate in expanding regions. Despite strong barriers to growth in Appalachia, our empirical results suggest that self-employment is positively associated with employment and income growth, and that efforts to promote entrepreneurial capacity may be among the few economic development strategies with positive payoffs in remote regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores rural U.S. crime patterns with a focus on social capital. We use a triangulation of three core theories of crime including social disorganization, anomie/strain, and rational choice theories to develop a formal theory and an empirical framework. The role of four unique measures of social capital is explored in understanding patterns of rural crime using nonmetropolitan U.S. county data. The empirical results generally support the theoretical predictions and conclude that rural communities that pursue economic growth and development must be prepared to address the resulting upward pressures on crime. The results on social capital and crime provide numerous policy insights for rural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]