What regions do rather than make: A proposed set of knowledge-based occupation clusters

Summary. With the expansion of knowledge-intensive industries in the US, along with intensi-fying focus on workforce development policy as an economic development strategy, occupations are increasingly being used as basic units of analysis in applied studies of urban and regional economies. An heretofore underappreciated component of occupation-based regional analysis is the need to understand relationships, similarities and dissimilarities among occupations them-selves, so that they may be aggregated or grouped in theoretically and empirically meaningful ways. This paper lays out a conceptual framework and empirical approach to identifying knowledge-based occupation clusters, or groups of occupations that share the same broad knowledge characteristics. Following an application of the clusters to a comparison of labour pools in a selected 38 metropolitan economies, the paper discusses the clusters ’ general value for regional economic analysis, especially their utility as an intermediate step in applied industry cluster analyses where necessary regional occupation data are limited

Old and New Theories of Industry Clusters

Abstract. The paper reviews the broad range of theories and ideas that constitute, often implicitly, the logic behind strategic cluster policies. The title of the paper notwithstanding, there is no theory of industry clusters, per se. Even Porter’s (1990) seminal contribution is more a theory of firm competitiveness than clusters. There is, instead, a variety of older and newer theories of 1) the interrelationships between economic actors that clusters describe, and 2) the implications of such interrelationships for economic growth and development. Industry clusters have proven a useful way of characterizing webs of relationships between and among firms and other institutions. Policy makers designing cluster strategies attempt to leverage such relationships in the interest of growth and development objectives. For their part, regional scholars must strive to specify and test clearer hypotheses about the workings and impacts of such relationships in order to verify the efficacy of cluster policies. 1