5. Conclusions
This study proposes a framework that decomposes co-location externalities into the categories of: externalities caused by competition, externalities resulting from cooperation and externalities derived from mere location. Unexpectedly, our results show that the positive externalities of competition are reinforced as co-location increases. But as in the case of cooperation, such externalities are never as strong as to turn competition into a positive effect. The model introduced argues that as co-location increases, the externalities carried out by competition, location and cooperation increase in strength. Also, new externalities that derive from cooperation, competition, or location arise as agglomeration escalates. This vision unifies previous studies and shows that positive, negative, curvilinear and neutral effects of co-location on export performance are indeed possible. The nature of cooperation, competition, and location advantages at each site will be the determining factors of the net co-location effect on export performance.
Our study contributes to the current management debate on the effects of co-located firms in industry clusters by detailing the externalities that rise directly from the actions of cooperation, competition and location (Geldes et al., 2015). Previous conceptual models depicting the mechanism of co-location on export performance (e.g. Becchetti & Rossi, 2000; Fernhaber et al., 2008; Zhao & Zou, 2002) were fairly limited and did not consider cooperation to render a potential negative effect on export performance or competition to have a conceivable positive effect on export performance.
