TY - CEPII
A1 - Lionel Fontagné
A1 - Pamina Koenig
A1 - Florian Mayneris
A1 - Sandra Poncet
TI - Clustering the Winners: the French Policy of Competitiveness Clusters
IS - 2010-18
T3 - Working Papers
KW - Competitiveness
KW - Clusters
KW - International Trade
KW - Firm selection
N2 - In 2005 the French government launched a policy of competitiveness clusters, giving subsidies for innovative projects managed locally and collectively by firms, research centers and universities. This paper proposes an ex-ante analysis of the outcome of the selection process that took place before the implementation of the subsidies program, in order to assess whether the policy ended up in choosing winners or losers. We first ask how the clusters have been selected, and then focus on the selection of firms within the clusters, using export and productivity as a measure of performance. Our main conclusion is that public authorities have chosen the winners during the two-step selection procedure. Export premium, beyond what individual characteristics would predict, is however most visible within the category of clusters having no international ambition, where heterogeneity among firms is the largest.
ER -