Clustering, logistics, and spatial economics

In the last decade, the number of logistic service providers located in clusters across Europe has increased substantially. Because location choice models in logistics studies are not able to give a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon, various spatial economic concepts are studied in this paper. The main purpose is to provide more insight into the selection of economically attractive locations within these concepts and, more specifically, into the decision of individual firms whether or not to join a cluster. Such insight may lead to an improvement of the existing logistic models. It appears that the spatial economic concepts describe several mechanisms that are relevant to the clustering of logistic service providers. These mechanisms can possibly be incorporated in logistic clustering models