Industrial Spatial Coagglomeration,Knowledge Spillovers and Innovation Performance:Discussion on the Construction Path of Regional Diversified Industrial Clusters
The impact of cross-industry spatial coagglomeration on enhancing innovation performance constitutes a highly dynamic area of inquiry.Positioned as a competitive hypothesis of Marshall-Arrow-Romer(MAR)externalities,Jacobs externalities are sub-stantiated by extensive empirical evidence and a robust theoretical underpinning.However,the pivotal mechanism of Jacobs exter-nalities resides in tacit knowledge spillovers,characterized by spatial attenuation effects,which primarily manifest within more local-ized geographic spaces,thereby resulting in a scarcity of concrete empirical evidence within academia in this regard.This study,grounded in the theoretical framework of the knowledge production function,employs an industrial coagglomera-tion index algorithm based on Wasserstein distance and Monte Carlo simulations to empirically examine whether diversified"tech-nological knowledge pools"from geographically proximate industries outside the focal sector yield knowledge spillover effects,thereby enhancing innovation performance within the focal industry.Specifically,by leveraging the directional characteristics of in-dustrial coagglomeration,the study bi-directionally investigates the differential impacts of technological knowledge pools shaped by"active coagglomeration"and"passive coagglomeration",thereby elucidating the mechanisms of industry diversification-driven knowledge spillovers and addressing the inadequacies of traditional diversification indices in testing Jacobs externalities.The findings reveal that industry innovation levels are positively influenced by the diversified technological knowl-edge pools shaped through spatial coagglomeration of industries.Even after employing the UK's industrial coagglomera-tion index as an instrumental variable to address potential endogeneity issues,the conclusions remain robust.The innova-tion spillover effects of active coagglomeration surpass those of passive coagglomeration,with the impact of technologi-cal knowledge pools on the industry innovation scale slightly outweighing that on innovation quality.Through inter-industry patent citations,this paper further substantiates that knowledge spillovers constitute the primary mechanism through which industrial coagglomeration is influenced by technological knowledge pools outside the focal sector.Fur-ther research reveals a weak correlation between input-output and technological linkages,indicating significant disparities in the innovation impacts of industrial coagglomeration under these distinct linkage drivers.Empirical evidence suggests that industries characterized by input-output linkages can significantly enhance mutual innovation capabilities only through active coagglomeration,challenging the efficacy of traditional innovation network construction based on industry upstream-downstream relationships.Conversely,industries with technological linkages exhibit pronounced"parasitic ef-fects,"whereby the innovation capabilities of passively coagglomerated industries are significantly undermined by ac-tively coagglomerated industries,emphasizing the importance of intellectual property protection.The marginal contributions of this paper primarily lie in the following aspects:(1)the initial verification,through geographi-cally proximate industrial coagglomeration indices,of the impact of technological knowledge pools shaped through inter-industry co-agglomeration on industry innovation performance;(2)attempting to address endogeneity issues in empirical testing by employing the UK's industrial coagglomeration index as an instrumental variable for causal identification;(3)from the perspective of inter-industry patent citations,validating the micro-mechanisms of knowledge spillovers from inter-industry spatial coagglomeration,and differentiating the effects of technological knowledge pools shaped through industrial coagglomeration on innovation performance based on input-output and technological linkages,thereby providing empirical evidence for the clustered development path of Chi-nese industrial innovation.This research offers a new explanatory perspective on Jacobs externalities and provides evidence from China,while also offering decision-making references for the high-quality innovation development of future industrial clusters in China.
Spatial CoagglomerationKnowledge PoolKnowledge SpilloversInnovation PromotionIndustrial Cluster Construction