Big firms, long arms, wide shoulders: The 'hub-and-spoke' industrial district in the Seattle region

Rapidly growing regions exhibit distinct varieties of industrial district structure. One variant is the hub-and-spoke form, where an industry and its suppliers cluster around one or several core firms. The hub-and-spoke district is distinct from the flexibly specialized district, its successs a function of dominant firm market power and strategy rather than networking. Hub-and-spoke districts are capable of generating high regional growth rates and good income distributions, but may render a region vulnerable to cyclical and secular decline and/or to the crowding out of noncompeting, newer sectors. The paper analyses the Seattle region as a hub-and-spoke district.