Industrial organization and the spatial organization of industries

Sammanfattning: The dissertation aims at making a contribution to the field of industrial organization/dynamics, spatial organization of industries and regional policy. This has been done by paying more attention to the strategies of the firm and to the link between the firms, the industry as well as the region and the implications for regional policy. More specifically, the dissertation makes a contribution to economic geography by reassessing the importance of traded and untraded externalities and by deriving new regional policy conclusions. It has attempted to challenge existing theories, bring together theories from different disciplines and scale (from micro- to macro-level) to explain these phenomena and elaborate on the theories potentials and limitations in explaining externalities. The dissertation is based on a collection of papers which combines theoretical insights with in-depth or illustrative cases.