Sharing a common location is important to establish business relations and to minimize transaction costs. Second, firms in the cluster are geographically proximate. Other industries called “local”, in contrast, are dispersed across the nation, with their size proportional to the region’s size. There are five general characteristics.įirst, clusters contain the firms from the so-called “traded industries” – those that “concentrate in particular regions but sell products or services across regions and countries”. To address this drawback, various papers attempted to establish a clear set of cluster criteria. Failing to distinguish the two may lead to the government investing in expensive yet abortive cluster initiatives. However, the definition alone does not allow one to fully understand when a group of firms becomes a cluster. As multiple studies show, this approach remained majorly intact over the years.
Stemming from the classic concept of economies of agglomeration, clusters were defined as “geographic concentrations of interconnected companies and institutions in a particular field”.
The concept of clusters was popularized by Michael Porter back in the 1990s. For this reason, in recent decades both developed and developing countries are actively adopting the so-called cluster approach. It deprives one of understanding the relations between industries and how they aggregate into value chains. Viewing economic development through a prism of separate industries is obsolete. While the text is centered around Kazakhstan, its major findings could contribute to a broader group of countries. We argue that clusters must be redefined in the local policymaking, and that cluster observatory could be a major tool for addressing existing policy gaps. Towards this goal, the article provides the evaluation of the government approach to traded clusters and presents a cluster observatory prototype based on the original methodology by Delgado, Porter, and Stern. The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges in cluster policy formation in Kazakhstan and to offer recommendations on its improvement. Introduced by the government in 2005, the notion of clusters has been largely misinterpreted, if compared to the universally accepted definition. While their positive effects are commonly agreed with, some governments still do not have a sound and structured cluster policy. Abstract. Traded clusters are geographic concentrations of interrelated industries.
0 kommentar(er)
