Patterns of Localisation in the French Manufacturing and Service Industries: a Distance-Based Approach

Abstract

We explore the patterns of localisation in the French manufacturing and service industries using the distance-based approach developed by Duranton and Overman (2005). The idea of this methodology is to consider the distribution of distances between pairs of plants in an industry and to compare it with that of a hypothetical industry with the same number of plants which are randomly distributed conditional on the distribution of aggregate activity. Relying on the same industrial classification as the one used by these authors, we show that their main conclusions remain valid in the case of French manufacturing industries. First, fewer manufacturing industries are found to be globally localised than usually found with discrete indices (Ellison-Glaeser, Maurel-Sédillot). Second, localisation takes place at small distance (localisation, K-density, spatial statistics, point-pattern processes