Areas of large enterprise and industrial districts in the development of post-war Italy: A preliminary survey

Innovation, structural change and productivity growth: evidence from Italian regions, 1980-2003

“…A closer look to the evolution of industrial specialization in the two areas has revealed the existence of significantly different regional patterns. Indeed, NEC regions show persistent increasing rates of specialization in manufacturing activity during the 1980s and 1990s, while in the North-West the weight of manufacturing sectors decreases (Becattini and Coltorti, 2006). It seems therefore that at the turning of the century NEC regions are characterized by specialization indexes very close to (and in some cases even higher than) the values featuring North-Western regions.…”

Productivity, Competitiveness, and Territories of the Italian Medium-Sized Companies

“…They are further classified, based on their operational headquarters, by city, province, area according to Becattini and Coltorti (2006) approach (districts, large firm provinces and residual ones); for this study we also identified the urban areas as provinces with more than 2 million inhabitants, the highly populated areas as provinces with more than 500 thousand inhabitants, district areas and local manufacturing systems. Districts are identified based on a criterion of prevalence of information sources (see Mediobanca-Unioncamere, 2013, pp.…”

“…intercept) and as interaction effects with the covariates (slope of their relationships with the dependent variable), for which it is reasonable to assume that the impact on productivity varies along with territories and size. Our focus on territories, defined according to the classification by areas (Becattini-Coltorti, 2006), aims at verifying the impact on productivity of the economies of aggregation; the highly populated areas would offer a number of benefits, such as pooling of the labor market, proximity to local suppliers and target markets, spillover of technologies and knowledge; on the other hand, they would suffer some relevant drawbacks, such as congestion costs, higher costs of spaces, etc. The highly populated areas would also trigger selection economies (Combes, Duranton, Gobillon, Puga, & Roux, 2012): both as an ex post process, since larger markets would attract more entrants, favoring more competition and the abandonment of less efficient and competitive firms, and as an ex ante sorting process, since less efficient firms and less skilled workers would avoid the more dense and competitive areas.…”

“…We first estimated the inputs" coefficients by industry, and subsequently, in order to support the statement under b), by industry and territory, using the classification of territories proposed by Becattini and Coltorti (2006) and including in the function both the industry fixed effects and the year-region interaction effects (Note 10).…”

“…from the relative position of the individual firm vs. those of the same industry. local system of operations organization provinces classified according to Becattini-Coltorti (2006) …”