مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد شبکه محلی در مناطق صنعتی ( الزویر )

مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Economic regions are far frombeing thequiet andstatic environments originally described by classical models. The globalization of markets and production activities is rapidly reshaping the economic landscape, breaking the existing local equilibria and leading an increasing number of regions towards new irreversible scenarios. In this evolving context, the survival chances tend to be higher for those local systems showing higher adaptive behaviour, as the recent literature on regional resilience has clearly stated (Martin, 2011; Simmie and Martin, 2010). The challenge raised by this phenomenon is particularly steep for Marshallian industrial districts (IDs), where the simultaneous action of inward and outward forces associated with globalization and the reactions of local business populations have triggered a reshaping process of these formerly closed networks: the main determinants of this evolutionary process are the increasing presence of migrant businesses and the E-mail address: jcanello@uncc.edu 1 I thank Fabiano Schivardi, Andrea Pozzi, Paolo Pavone, Jason Potts, John Foster, Prasada Rao, Peter Earl, participants at presentations at the Annual European Conference (2013) and Global Conference (2014) of the Regional Studies Association and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and discussions. I am thankful to the Italian Revenue Agency and SOSE – Soluzioni per il Sistema Economico S.p.A. for providing support for this research. implementation of offshoring and offshore outsourcing strategies by district firms (Rabellotti et al., 2009). Most empirical works (e.g. De Propris et al., 2005; Cusmano et al., 2010) have focused on the latter aspect, while the former has been overlooked due to the lack of suitable microdata.

The aim of this paper is to interpret the evolutionary dynamics of Italian industrial districts by focusing on an inward force that is gradually redesigning the internal structure of local networks: the rapid diffusion of migrant entrepreneurship. This phenomenon is evident in several sectors of the Italian economy: interestingly, in manufacturing activities this presence often tends to cluster inside industrial districts (Barberis, 2008, 2011; Lombardi and Sforzi, 2016). In these specific contexts,the benefits associated with labour pooling, input–output linkages and knowledge spillovers can potentially improve the performance of those entrants who succeed in interacting effectively with the local network. The successful integration of the newcomers is expected to generate positive externalities in the host economic network, as local firms can exploit the advantages arising from accumulation of diverse know-how andfromthe connections built by foreignentrepreneurs in their home countries.

The empirical investigation implemented in this work provides evidence of the survival and performance trends of indigenous and migrant firms in different types of local systems, in an attempt to find a systematic relationship between the survival chances and the performance of a migrant entrepreneur and the decision to set up a business inside an industrial district. The aim ofthis empirical exercise is to identify the conditions under which the ‘district effect’ is exploitable by migrant firms and whether this benefitis compatible with the stability of the local firm population: it is believed that the findings will shed new light as to what extent the local knowledge embedded in industrial districts is appropriable by migrants and whether migrant firms are enabled to feed the district with their skills and abilities,providing benefits for the future stability ofthese local systems. The analysis is implemented on a large sample of micro and small firms extracted from the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance Annual Survey, focusing on manufacturing industries where the presence of both migrant firms and industrial districts is particularly relevant. A major benefit from using this data source arises from the possibility to identify a significant number of businesses excluded from the most commonly used firm-level databases, thus unveiling a relevant grey area where immigrant entrepreneurship has mushroomed in the recent past. The present paper represents a step forward with respect to previous research on migrant entrepreneurship in industrial districts, which is essentially limited to case studies given the lack of suitable microdata.