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

作为规划经济发展的一项战略，工业聚集已经恢复。然而，尽管过去30多年来在环境问题方面取得了巨大进展，但工业集群的环境绩效并未受到太多关注。显然，企业有时会在同一地点利用彼此的物质和能源资源流动，创造一种由“工业共生”诱导的特殊外部经济。通过将一家公司的潜在浪费转化为另一家公司的有用投入，工业共生可以改善共享这种关系的公司的集体环境和经济绩效。迄今为止，工业共生的证据仍然局限于一些深入的案例研究。此外，几乎没有发现基本原则来解释案例研究公司之间的产业共生行为最初是如何产生的。考虑到这一点，本研究的重点是调查当其他企业聚集在一组选定的“肮脏”行业时，这些企业在多大程度上改善了它们的环境绩效。本研究将采用定量和定性的方法来考察产业集群中企业的集体环境绩效。将对几个所谓的“生态工业园区”进行个案研究，以发现其产生和选址的动机。他们的环保表现和不那么“绿色”的等价物之间的差异也将被衡量。来自案例研究的信息将为公司层面数据的统计分析提供信息。利用空间分析技术，该研究将确定在较大的“肮脏”工业设施（如钢厂、水泥耐火材料、炼油厂、化工厂、发电厂）附近有过度聚集趋势的工业。这项研究还将确定环境政策的变化，鼓励公司迁入或迁出这些固定的集群。预期这项研究的结果将表明，一些工业聚集地不仅在经济上很重要，而且在环境上也越来越可取。因此，本研究的结果将扩展当前可能的可持续经济发展政策。因此，预期的研究结果可能对中国和韩国等快速发展中国家的产业政策提供信息尤其重要，这些国家正在应用基于集群的倡议。作为博士论文研究改进补助金，该奖项使有前途的学生能够建立强大的独立研究生涯。

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.