Economic Performance, Inter-Firm Relations and Local Institutional Engineering in a Computational Prototype of Industrial Districts

Industrial districts can be conceived as complex systems characterised by a network of interactions amongst heterogeneous, localised, functionally integrated and complementary firms. In a previous paper, we have introduced an industrial district computational prototype, showing that the economic performance of an industrial district proceeds to the form through which firms interact and co-ordinate each others. In this paper, we use such computational framework to experiment different options of “local institutional engineeringâ€, trying to understand how specific “supporting institutions†could perform macro-collective activities, such as, i.e., technology research, transfer and information, improving the technological adaptation of firms. Is a district more than a simple aggregation of localised firms? What can explain the economic performance of firms localised into the same space? Could some options of “local institutional engineering†improve the performance of a district? Could such options set aside the problem of how firms dynamically interact? These are questions explored in this paper.