Lionel Fontagné

Clustering the Winners: The French Policy of Competitiveness Clusters

In 2005 the French government launched a policy of competitiveness clusters, giving subsidies for innovative projects managed locally and collectively by firms, research centers and universities. This paper proposes an ex-ante analysis of the outcome of the selection process that took place before the implementation of the subsidies program, in order to assess whether the policy ended up in choosing winners or losers. We first ask how the clusters have been selected, and then focus on the selection of firms within the clusters, using export and productivity as a measure of performance. Our main conclusion is that public authorities have chosen the winners during the two-step selection procedure. Export premium, beyond what individual characteristics would predict, is however most visible within the category of clusters having no international ambition, where heterogeneity among firms is the largest.

Cluster Policies and Firm Selection: Evidence from France

In this paper, we shed light on the selection of the benefi ciaries from the French competitiveness cluster policy which was launched in 2005 and extended to 2012. We disentangle the selection and self-selection eff ects, as emphasized in the theoretical literature on regional and industrial policy. Our main conclusion is that winners were (self-)selected at both steps of the procedure, and that this holds for the three cluster types: worldwide clusters , potentially worldwide clusters and national clusters . We thus provide a methodology which allows us to contrast the e ffective outcomes of the selection process and the official objectives of cluster policies in terms of targeting, and which thus helps in their econometric evaluation.

Foreign trade and FDI stocks in British, US and French industries: complements or substitutes?

This chapter presents new empirical evidence about the impact of foreign direct investment on the level and composition of international trade. Foreign direct investment (FDI) and international production have both continued to expand rapidly in recent years. Global inflows of FDI rose by an average 19 per cent per annum between 1991 and 1997, and by an estimated 38 per cent in 1998, to reach roughly

Potentiels de commerce entre économies hétérogènes : un petit mode d'emploi des modèles de gravité

644 billion. Around 50,000 parent companies, with 450,000 affiliates now operate worldwide (UNCTAD, 1998). The foreign affiliates alone account for 6 per cent of world GDP, compared with 2 per cent in 1982 (Hummels, 1998). Intra-firm trade now accounts for one-third of world exports, with the sales of foreign affiliates having risen faster than global trade in recent years.