An Exploratory Spatial Analysis about the Spatial Distribution of Economic Activities in Portugal

Abstract

Economic activities are not evenly distributed throughout the territory. As such, the geographical concentration of economic activities has aroused a great interest in the academic community, following such famous examples as Silicon Valley (California), Route 128 (Boston), Cambridge (UK), the federal state of Baden Wurttemberg (Germany). Given the importance of this matter, regarded as a priority in terms of economic development policies, the aim of this paper is to measure and describe the spatial distribution pattern of the main sectors of economic activity in Portugal. For this we follow the methodology of (Guillain & Le Gallo, 2010), combining the locational Gini index with an Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis, applied to the employment data by sector and by municipalities in 2009 and 2010. This approach has the advantage of introducing a spatial dimension to the usual measures of concentration, thus seeking to determine the location pattern of each sector of activity and to measure spatial correlation.