Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Collective Environmental Performance of Firms in Industrial Clusters: A Spatial Analysis

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Agglomerations of industry have been revived as a strategy for planning economic development. Despite the great inroads made during the past 30 plus years regarding environmental concerns, however, the environmental performance of industry agglomerations has not received much attention. Firms apparently sometimes co-locate to take advantage of one another's material and energy resource flows, creating a specific kind of external economy induced by "industrial symbiosis." By turning the potential waste of one firm into the useful inputs of another, industrial symbiosis can improve the collective environmental and economic performance of firms sharing in such relationships. To date, evidence of industrial symbiosis remains limited to a few intensive case studies. Moreover, few fundamental principles have been found that explain how industrial symbiotic behavior was initially generated among the case-study firms. With this in mind, the focus of this research is to investigate the extent to which firms in a selected set of "dirty" industries improve their environmental performance when other firms cluster near them. The study will use quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the collective environmental performance of firms in industrial clusters. Case studies of several so-called "eco-industrial parks" will be undertaken to discover the motivations for their genesis and location. The difference between their environmental performance and less "green" equivalents also will be measured. Information from the case studies will inform statistical analyses of firm-level data. Using spatial analytic techniques, the study will identify industries with an inordinate tendency to cluster near larger "dirty" industrial facilities (e.g., steel mills, cement refractories, oil refineries, chemical plants, power plants). The study also will identify changes in environmental policy that encourage firms to relocate into or out of such anchored clusters. The results of this study are expected to demonstrate that some industrial agglomerations are not only economically important but are also becoming environmentally desirable. Thus, this study's findings will extend the current set of possible sustainable economic development policies. The expected findings therefore may be especially crucial to informing industrial policy in rapidly developing nations, like China and South Korea, where cluster-based initiatives are being applied. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, this award enables a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.