• DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-96661-8_46
• Corpus ID: 53687154

The Principle of Relatedness

@inproceedings{Hidalgo2018ThePO,
  title={The Principle of Relatedness},
  author={C{\'e}sar A. Hidalgo and Pierre-Alexandre Balland and Ron Boschma and Mercedes Delgado and Maryann Feldman and Koen Frenken and Edward L. Glaeser and Canfei He and Dieter Franz Kogler and Andrea Morrison and Frank M. H. Neffke and David L. Rigby and Scott Stern and Siqi Zheng and Shengjun Zhu},
  year={2018}
}

• César A. Hidalgo, P. Balland, +12 authors Shengjun Zhu
• Published 22 July 2018
• Economics

The idea that skills, technology, and knowledge, are spatially concentrated, has a long academic tradition. Yet, only recently this hypothesis has been empirically formalized and corroborated at multiple spatial scales, for different economic activities, and for a diversity of institutional regimes. The new synthesis is an empirical principle describing the probability that a region enters - or exits - an economic activity as a function of the number of related activities pre- sent in that location. In this paper we summarize some of the recent empirical evidence that has generalized the principle of relatedness to a fact describing the entry and exit of products, industries, occupations, and technologies, at the national, regional, and metropolitan scales. We conclude by describing some of the policy implications and future avenues of research implied by this robust empirical principle.