The role of spatial effects in the empirical analysis of regional concentration

Economists have recently devoted an increasing attention to the issue of spatial concentration of economic activities. However, surprisingly enough, most of the empirical work is still based on the computation of very basic statistical measures in which the geographical characteristics of data play no role. By making use of a series of empirical examples we show that spatial concentration consists of two different features that are rarely kept as separate in the statistical analysis: an a-spatial concept of variability which is invariant to permutations, and the concept of polarization that refers to the geographical position of observations. © Springer-Verlag 2001.