The empirical evidence of industrial districts in Italy

This chapter of the Handbook is about the Italian experience of identifying industrial districts (IDs). The mapping of IDs is not an exercise in applied economics, that is to test hypotheses on IDs, but is the completion of the research path that led Giacomo Becattini and the Florence school to formulate the IDs thesis. The Introduction deals with the ID both as a way to classify the national economy – that is, the ID as “unit of analysis” – and as a way to organise the production – that is, the ID as a “model of development”. Section 2 summarises the political foundations of ID; section 3 briefly introduces the concept of ID for the purpose of its empirical definition, and makes some criticism about the assimilation between ID and cluster; section 4 discusses the methodological issues; section 5 is devoted to the description of data and the algorithm used for mapping IDs, as well as a short comment on the results; section 6 elucidates the quantitative importance of IDs in the Italian economy. The concluding section contains some final remarks aimed at demonstrate the resilience of the district model compared with the model of big business.