Impact of industry clusters on the performance of Russian private companies: Inter-industry analysis

This paper discovers the sustainability of agglomeration externalities and robustness issues for Russian private real sector companies between 2011 to 2018. Agglomeration effects are measured with the Ellison—Glaeser index (industry is supposed to be clustered in certain region(s) if the EG value is high). Firms’ sales margin was chosen as the main performance characteristic (dependent variable). The sample was divided into six aggregated groups (agriculture, mining, manufacturing, transport, IT, services). For each of them, sustainability and robustness of the concentration effect were checked using OLS estimates obtained for each year. Companies, located in and out of the cluster were studied separately. Strong, sustainable, and positive concentration effects were found for the agricultural, mining and transport industries. Sustainable negative agglomeration effects appear for the manufacturing and service industries. For IT companies located inside the industry cluster the agglomeration effect appeared to be negative and for those outside it — positive.