An Empirical Study On The Spatial Agglomeration Of Manufacturing Industries In China And The Impact Of Knowledge Spillover

One of the central themes in the industrial organization literature is toexplain the degree of concentration of economic activity within an industry.The related related research has developed vastly since the1980s(Krugman,1991;Kim,1995; Hanson,2001). At the same time, the emerging importance oflocation as a unit of observation argues for examing both production andinnovation within a geographic context. So far, there’s hardly any study aboutthe agglomeration of innovative activities of industries in China. Thus theanalysis and its result in this paper has filled this blank.We use the related data in27manufacturing industries during the periodof2002-2009to study the spatial agglomeration in these industries, and thencompare them with the corresponding production activities. At the same time,we analysed the determinants of innovative activities based on the work ofAudretsch and Feldman(1996). In the end, we concluded as follows:1.According to the results of Spatial Gini Coefficients, the innovativeactivities in manufacturing industries of China tend to agglomerate more thanthe production activities, and the distribution of these two activities are notcompletedly overlaid;2.Zhejiang and Sichuan are the most innovativeprovinces in China, surpassing other traditional provinces like Shandong andJiangsu, both of which are the most productive provinces of manufacturing inChina;3.Different from the results of the research in the United States, Oncethe production spatial concentration is controlled, the “knowledge input”variable in a certain industry has positive and prominent impact on the spatialagglomeration of innovative activities of that industry. This supports theconclusion in Audretsch and Feldman(1996).