CESIS Electronic Working Paper Series Paper No.67 THE ANALYSIS OF LOCATION, CO-LOCATION AND 1 URBANISATION ECONOMIES Börje Johansson2 and Ulla Forslund 3 May 2006 1 Status of the paper: The paper has been written as a contribution to a Handbook of Research on Clusters 2 CESIS, Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies, The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm and JIBS, Jönköping International Business School. Email:
[email protected]. 3 JIBS, Jönköping International Business School. Email:
[email protected] THE ANALYSIS OF LOCATION, CO-LOCATION AND URBANISATION ECONOMIES Börje Johansson and Ulla Forslund Abstract This paper provides an overview and critical assessment of co-location and clustering in space. Basic location conditions include accessibility to customers, input suppliers including knowledge providers, and regional endowments. A distinction is made between slow and fast location adjustments. In a basic model, it is shown how distance sensitivity and scale economies generate self-reinforcing location externalities. Variations of the same model are employed to illuminate how urbanisation economies can stimulate co-location and clustering. One model variant is designed to examine how innovation activities also can be influenced by urbanisation economies. The paper concludes that a set of basic principals form the basis for localisation and urbanisation economies. However, there remains a challenging gap between model predictions and empirical observations. JEL classification: L14, L29, O30, R30 Keywords: Location, co-location economies, agglomeration economies, urbanisation economies 1 1. INTRODUCTION Location analysis has two major perspectives. The first is concerned with where to place a given economic activity or facility, defined as optimization problem, where the properties of the economic environment are taken as a given fact.