This paper aims to assess the extent of agglomeration processes across industries and along time within a regional economic system by means of a distance-based measure. Specifically, we compute Marcon & Puech’s (2017) M for every industry in Sardinia in 2007 and 2012. This computation allows us to to assess the underlying patterns of agglomeration or dispersion throughout the Great Recession, through a study that is not limited to manufacturing activities but also covers service industries and other sectors.
At the same time, this is the first tentative operationalization of M for an entire region, thanks to an approximation of plant addresses with the centroids of the municipalities where they are located. Such an approximation is aimed to reduce the computational intensity that has prevented M from being actually used for the study of the entire economic activity of areas larger than individual neighborhoods or cities. Preliminary evidence seems encouraging and suggests future developments in this direction.