An Integrated Duranton and Overman Index and Local Duranton and Overman Index Framework for Industrial Spatial Agglomeration Pattern Analysis

Accurately measuring industrial spatial agglomeration patterns is crucial for promoting regional economic development. However, few studies have considered both agglomeration degrees and cluster locations of industries. Moreover, the traditional multi-scale cluster location mining (MCLM) method still has limitations in terms of accuracy, parameter setting, calculation efficiency, etc. This study proposes a new framework for analyzing industrial spatial agglomeration patterns, which uses the Duranton and Overman (DO) index for estimating agglomeration degrees and a newly developed local DO (LDO) index for mining cluster locations. The MCLM-LDO method was proposed by incorporating the LDO index into the MCLM method, and it was validated via comparisons with three baseline methods based on two synthetic datasets. The results proved that the MCLM-LDO method can achieve accuracies of 0.945 and 1 with computational times of 0.15 s and 0.11 s on two datasets, which are superior to existing MCLM methods. The proposed framework was further applied to analyze the spatial agglomeration patterns of the industry of computer, communication, and other electronic equipment manufacturing in Guangdong Province, China. The results showed that the framework gives a more holistic perspective of spatial agglomeration patterns, which can serve as more meaningful references for industrial sustainable development.