Impact of Firms' Clustering on Export Performance of the Constituent Units : A Study of Brassware Manufacturing Firms in Jamnagar

Industrial clusters are increasingly being viewed as channels for economic growth both at the country level and as sources of enhanced performance at the firm-level by strengthening the agglomerated firms and providing them a platform to access global markets more successfully. Previous studies in the field of firm-level export performance have sought to ascertain several important determinants of export performance however, giving little attention to the effect of clustering towards the same. Hence, the current study empirically attempts to examine the effect of clustering on firm-export performance and highlighting the significant advantages that the management of these units could leverage via the cluster initiatives. The study draws its sample from the brass-ware manufacturing cluster comprised of small and medium sized exporting firms operating in Jamnagar region of Gujarat, India. Note: The full paper is uploaded for the ready reference of the researchers. The copyright of the paper rests with the publishers who have made full paper available on the internet. For the commercial use of this paper permission from the publisher is needed