Which economic analysis is really enabled by district maps in Italy?

Industrial clusters have played a central role for economies of many countries during the past decades. While there is an abundance of qualitative analysis on these, for a long time many observers lament the lack of a statistical operational definition of industrial agglomerations, which may constitute a classificatory paradigm whereby data may be organized on a geographical basis so as to submit theoretical hypotheses to both measurement and econometric testing. The present paper aims at disentangling which economic analysis is really enabled by the available district maps for the Italian territory. To this purpose the two most relevant maps, one of whom is by the National Office of Statistics (ISTAT), are compared to highlight the different descriptions of the industrial districts geography and its transformations. The two approaches reveal many notes of disagreement. As a whole, the method adopted by ISTAT represents a fundamentally important contribution to local economic analysis; nonetheless, some useful suggestions might be received by means of this comparison