Industrial Spatial Agglomeration Using Distance-based Approach in Beijing, China

To study the difference of industrial location among different industries, this article is to test the spatial agglomeration across industries and firm sizes at the city level. Our research bases on a unique plant-level data set of Beijing and employs a distance-based approach, which considers space as continuous. Unlike previous studies, we set two sets of references for service and manufacturing industries respectively to adapt to the investigation in the intra-urban area. Comparing among eight types of industries and different firm sizes, we find that: 1) producer service, high-tech industries and labor-intensive manufacturing industries are more likely to cluster, whereas personal service and capital-intensive industries tend to be randomly dispersed in Beijing; 2) the spillover of the co-location of firms is more important to knowledge-intensive industries and has more significant impact on their allocation than business-oriented services in the intra-urban area; 3) the spatial agglomeration of service industries are driven by larger establishments, whereas manufacturing industries are mixed.

To study the difference of industrial location among different industries, this article is to test the spatial agglomeration across industries and firm sizes at the city level. Our research bases on a unique plant-level data set of Beijing and employs a distance-based approach, which considers space as continuous. Unlike previous studies, we set two sets of references for service and manufacturing industries respectively to adapt to the investigation in the intra-urban area. Comparing among eight types of industries and different firm sizes, we find that： 1） producer service, high-tech industries and labor-intensive manufacturing industries are more likely to cluster, whereas personal service and capital-intensive industries tend to be randomly dispersed in Beijing; 2） the spillover of the co-location of finns is more important to knowledge-intensive industries and has more significant impact on their allocation than business-oriented services in the intra-urban area; 3） the spatial agglomeration of service industries are driven by larger establishments, whereas manufac- turing industries are mixed.