A Comparison of Measures of Industrial Specialization For Travel-to-work Areas in Great Britain, 1981-1997

That industrial specialization is inversely correlated with regional size is an established empirical finding. However in establishing this relationship, authors have used several different measures of regional industrial specialization or diversification. This review paper investigates whether the choice of measure is important in such work. Eleven different measures found in the literature are compared with respect to their distributions, their degree of correspondence and their behaviour over time. It is found that there appear, within this set, to be three groups of measures. Within each group results are relatively consistent, whereas between each group the differences are quite marked. This suggests that results might be influenced by the choice of specialization measure used.