Agglomeration and firm performance: economies of scale, localisation, and urbanisation among Swedish export firms

In the 1990s, there has been an increase in interest in the spatial agglome ration of similar and related firms and industries. The recent literature i s, however, marked by a lack of balance between theoretical development and empirical validation of the importance of agglomeration economies. Our aim in this paper is to redress the balance by assessing empirically the impac t of various types of agglomeration economies on export performance. Our st udy is based on a unique data set including all Swedish export firms. We fi nd that localisation economies are not as important as recent theoretical c ontributions on industrial districts, new industrial spaces, and innovative milieus have led us to believe. Instead, traditional scale economies, toge ther with urbanisation economies, have a larger effect on export performanc e.