Khee Giap Tan: Backhoon Song's paper went beyond the traditional growth and productivity achieved through economic clusters but argued along the line of the Marshall thesis on agglomeration economies based on positive externalities in response to economic growth and the geographical concentration of firms where common resources in terms of labor productivity, technical know-how, infrastructure build-up, and management expertise and government facilitation were pooled, shared, and spilled over to generate spatial externalities. The author concludes that their empirical findings are consistent with the Marshall thesis where a firm located in a region with higher median total factor productivity (TFP) gains higher productivity from other firms in the same region due to easier access to superior external knowledge to generate new ideas where knowledge can be acquired not just from a firm's internal R&D investment but also from external sources from other firms through location proximity and hence higher future productivity....

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