Industrial Districts, Horizontal and Vertical Integration and Export Performance

Abstract

The degree of integration among firms is one of the most relevant features which discriminate among different types of agglomeration. Collaboration and cooperation relationships in production and marketing, division of labour coming from the disintegration of production process, supply relationships and research agreements, generate a feeling of solidarity among firms that little by little turns into necessity of hierarchy and organization. In this framework the chapter studies export performance of geographical agglomerated firms which presumably turn out to be integrated among them by the mean offormal or tacit agreements of cooperation. The chapter finds support for the existence of positive externalities coming from localization; such externalities, in turn, come from spillover effects, from a faster circulation of information flows and from firms imitation processes that accelerate the pace of innovations.