ABSTRACT
The competitive advantages of regional clusters have become the focus of scholarly and policy attention. Once they were only the province of economic geographers and regional scientists, but the work of Paul Krugman (1991) and Michael Porter (1990) has spurred widespread interest in regions at the same time that economic activity is becoming increasingly global. These newcomers have ignored an already extensive and sophisticated literature on the dynamics of industrial localization (see, for example, Storper 1989; Scott 1988a, b; Vernon 1960). Yet, like their predecessors, they share a reliance on external economies to explain the advantages that are derived from the spatial of clustering of economic activity.
