Agglomeration and dispersion of economic activities in Paris and its surroundings : An exploratory spatial data analysis

This paper analyses the agglomeration patterns for 26 manufacturing and services sectors in Paris and its surroundings in 1999. We adopt a methodology allowing the measurement of the degree of spatial agglomeration and the identification of location patterns of economic sectors. First, we compute the locational Gini coefficient and Moran's I statistics of global spatial autocorrelation. We show that these measures provide different but complementary information about the spatial agglomeration of the sectors considered. Second, we use the tools of Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis. Moran scatterplots and LISA statistics reveal a high level of diversity in location patterns across sectors.