Abstract
The idea that skills, technology, and knowledge, are spatially concentrated, has a long academic tradition. Yet, only recently this hypothesis has been empirically formalized and corroborated at multiple spatial scales, for different economic activities, and for a diversity of institutional regimes. The new synthesis is an empirical principle describing the probability that a region enters—or exits—an economic activity as a function of the number of related activities present in that location. In this paper we summarize some of the recent empirical evidence that has generalized the principle of relatedness to a fact describing the entry and exit of products, industries, occupations, and technologies, at the national, regional, and metropolitan scales. We conclude by describing some of the policy implications and future avenues of research implied by this robust empirical principle.
C. A. Hidalgo and P.-A. Balland—Contributed equally.
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Change history
21 July 2018
We have become aware that we omitted to cite the work of Feldman, M.P., Audretsch, D.B., 1999. in the fifth paragraph. Now the missing reference has been included in the chapter.
Notes
- 1.
Classic examples are the Volta River project in Ghana or the construction of a large Iron processing plant in Ipatinga Brazil.
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Hidalgo, C.A. et al. (2018). The Principle of Relatedness. In: Morales, A., Gershenson, C., Braha, D., Minai, A., Bar-Yam, Y. (eds) Unifying Themes in Complex Systems IX. ICCS 2018. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96661-8_46
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