Concentration of maritime advanced producer services: The case of Northwest Europe

In a globalising world economy clusters become more important. Increasingly, competitive advantages are to be found in local embedded knowledge and relationships which distant rivals cannot replicate. The research of this thesis focuses on a part of the maritime cluster, more specifically on the location choice of maritime advanced producer services. Over the last couple of decades the tertiary sector grew immensely due to technological progress which enhanced globalisation. Consequently, business service providers such as the maritime advanced producer service organisations started to operate globally. These firms are generally linked to each other through networks and concentrated in port cities. The location choice of an industry can be random, but when the industry starts to grow economies of scale arise. The positive externalities lead to the concentration of both, industries in clusters and aggregate activity in cities. These positive externalities are also known as agglomeration economies and do not arise from the mere presence of a cluster, but they have several specific sources. A theory developed by Marshall focuses on the concentration of activity within an industry which leads to specialisation opportunities from which localisation economies arise. A second theory, introduced by Jacobs, argues that it is the aggregated activity of the city that creates so called urbanisation economies. In this research I examined whether the localisation economies or the urbanisation economies are of greater importance to the maritime APS industry in Northwest Europe, more specifically the ‘Hamburg – Le Havre range’. The political and economic situations are similar in this area and more important it forms the European economic core and most populated area of Northwest Europe. During the research the location choice of the maritime APS firms has been evaluated and the relative size of the port of a city, in which the (local) head office of the maritime APS organisation is located, represents a proxy for the importance of the advantages of localisation economies from the concentrated maritime industry in the port and the advantages of the urbanisation economies from aggregated activity of a city to the APS organisations. The outcomes of this research suggest that the maritime advanced service producers find the localisation economies more important when the local head office is more specialised on a maritime level and when the local office is older. Regarding the characteristics of the total organisation the results show that localisation economies are more important to APS organisations when they operate in the consultancy and/or survey business, or when they are a maritime organisation. Finally, this is also the case for relatively large firms in terms of the total number of employees. Unfortunately, none of the explanatory variables are found to be significant and thus more research on this topic is recommended in the future.