A measure of the geographic concentration in French manufacturing industries

The purpose of this paper is to offer an empirical investigation of the geographic concentration of French industries. The index of concentration is derived from a location model in the line of Ellison and Glaeser (1994, 1997) and can be interpreted as the correlation between the location decisions of two business units in the same industry. Along with extractive and traditional industries, some high technology industries are highly localized, which supports the view that technological spillovers may be important. Besides, the identification of the most and least localized industries reveals similar patterns in France and in the U.S. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.