Polinuclear metropolis and competitiveness : changes in industrial location and international trade in metropolitan Barcelona

Economic literature on endogenous growth has tried to capture Marshallian externalities from the notion of homogenous region. However, some applied researches have argued recently against the usefulness of the homogenous regions as analytical units because the irruption of several localized densifications of productive activity of intrametropolitan nature. As a consequence, the metropolitan industry-mix could hide a high degree of specialization in several urban poles inside the metropolis. This paper tries to identify agglomeration economies --both localization and urbanization-- from the recent economic literature on economic growth and cities. Moreover, it gives a particular emphasis to the contributions on the influence of specialization or diversification, urban structure and intrametropolitan sectoral localization. At the same time, this paper studies some consequences of globalization process on the conditions of productive specialization, firm size, technological intensity and industrial location inside the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona, from the statistical data of foreign trade (1988-1997), local employment (1991 and 1996) and number of firms. Information has been distributed in 26 manufactured activities and in a wide range of territorial areas that try to identify poles and corridors inside the metropolitan region. The results show that in a metropolitan area as Barcelona there are several competitive systems with specialized companies, located in a polinucleated metropolitan space and with a flexible basis. Therefore, changes of regional foreign trade have been dramatic, with a growing share of mediumhigh technological intensity products. A diversified productive system, strong activity densifications in several urban cores and a small firm size are the main characteristic features of this area. In the same way, it's been identified an increasing role of corridors in location of productive activity and export performance, although concentration degree of several activities in the poles still remains high. So, the influence of urbanization economies in the evolution of medium-high industries seems to be progressively more significant