Public support to clusters : a firm level study of French 'local productive systems'

Philippe Martin (1) , Thierry Mayer (1) , Florian Mayneris (2)

1 ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po)
2 UCL IRES - Institut de recherches économiques et sociales

This paper analyzes empirically a public policy promoting industrial clusters in France. Cluster policies have become popular in many countries but have not been extensively evaluated empirically. We use data on production and employment for firms that benefited from the policy and on firms that did not, both before and after the policy started. We first show that the policy selected firms in relative decline. Furthermore, our results suggest that the policy had no major effect on their productivity but may have helped them in terms of employment.

Domains: Economics and Finance

Philippe Martin, Thierry Mayer, Florian Mayneris. Public support to clusters : a firm level study of French 'local productive systems'. 2008. ⟨hal-01066195⟩