Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Assessing The Impact Of Cluster Policies: The Case Of The Arranjos, Lucas Figal Garone, Alessandro Maffioli, Cesar M. Rodriguez, Gonzalo Vazquez Bare, Joao Alberto Denegri

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper assesses the impact of a cluster development policy in Latin America. A Local Productive Arrangement (APL) is a cluster of firms within the same territory, operating around the same activity and maintaining ties of cooperation and learning among themselves and with other stakeholders. Using firm-level data comprising information on SMEs from Brazil for the years 2002 to 2009 we apply fixed effects, matching and reweighting methods to estimate both the direct and the indirect – i.e. spillovers – causal effect of participating in APLs on a series of SMEs’ performance indicators, including level of employment, value of exports …