A typology of distance-based measures of spatial concentration

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2016.10.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Distance-based measures are powerful methods for detecting spatial structures.

  • We propose a typology of distance-based measures to understand all their properties.

  • We prove that all of these measures are built following the same five steps.

  • We discuss the relevance of those functions to address economic questions.

Abstract

Over the last decade, distance-based methods have been introduced and then improved in the field of spatial economics to gauge the geographic concentration of activities. There is a growing literature on this theme including new tools, discussions on their specific properties and various applications. However, there is currently no typology of distance-based methods. This paper fills that gap. The proposed classification helps understand all the properties of distance-based methods and proves that they are variations on the same framework.

Introduction

In the article on “spatial economics” in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Gilles Duranton wrote “On the empirical front, a first key challenge is to develop new tools for spatial analysis. With very detailed data becoming available, new tools are needed. Ideally, all the data work should be done in continuous space to avoid border biases and arbitrary spatial units.” (Duranton, 2008). In recent years, economists have made every effort in that direction. Measurement of the spatial concentration of activities is certainly one of the most striking examples and has been considerably renewed in the last decade with the development of distance-based methods (Combes et al., 2008). To present the motivation for the use of distance-based methods briefly, let us say that economists traditionally employ disproportionality methods (terminology used by Bickenbach and Bode, 2008) defined on a discrete definition of space. In the latter, the territory being analyzed is divided in several exclusive zones (e.g. a country is divided in turn into regions) and the spatial concentration of activities is evaluated at a given level of observation with the Gini (1912), the Ellison and Glaeser (1997) or the entropy indices of overall localization (Cutrini, 2009), for example. However, the issues arising from discrete spaces are now well known and linked to the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem – MAUP (Openshaw and Taylor 1979; Arbia, 1989): the position of the zoning boundaries and level of observation have an impact (Briant et al., 2010). A first tentative to limit the MAUP's effects is to combine discrete measures with autocorrelation measures. The motivation is the following: results of spatial concentration provided by discrete measures are not affected by the permutation of zones (see Arbia, 2001b, for an illustrative example). As autocorrelation measures evaluate the degree of similarity between zones, they can bring complementary results to the spatial concentration estimates (Guillain and Le Gallo, 2010). Some authors also try to correct in some extent aspatial concentration results by integrating the degree of autocorrelation to the spatial concentration indices (Guimarães et al., 2011). This approach can be of interest if data is only available at the aggregated level of the zone. A second way of research has been undoubtedly more explored since a decade. This second approach does not limit the effects of the MAUP but solves the MAUP. The basic idea is to remove any zoning of space. The development of spatial concentration indices is compulsory to take more effective account of geography (Marcon and Puech, 2003). This encourages the development of distance-based methods which are continuous functions of space. Distance-based measures provide information about concentration at all scales simultaneously and do not rely on zoning. In that case, individual data (and not aggregated data) is used. The seminal work by Ripley, 1976, Ripley, 1977 introduced the best known of the existing distance-based methods: the K function. The latter was taken up quickly by field scientists in ecology (see handbooks by Diggle, 1983, Cressie, 1993, for instance) but its use remained incidental in economics (Arbia, 1989, Arbia and Espa, 1996, Barff, 1987, Feser and Sweeney, 2000, Sweeney and Feser, 1998) until the works of Marcon and Puech, 2003, Marcon and Puech, 2010 and Duranton and Overman (2002)1 who introduced an alternative approach.

In this paper, we propose a typology of distance-based methods. There are two main reasons behind our work. First, a great variety of distance-based methods are used by economists today. The varied toolbox provided by these measures may bring some confusion for economists interested in testing a hypothesis rather than a methodology, so a state of the art may be helpful. Second, in this article we provide a unified theoretical framework by showing that all distance-based methods rely on counting the number of neighbors of points, normalizing this number by space or another number of neighbors, averaging the results in the appropriate way and finally normalizing the result. Monte-Carlo simulations of the null hypothesis allow the data to be tested against it and can also solve remaining issues. As a result, if objects (for example plants) attract each other, more neighbors (other plants) will be found around them on average than if they were distributed randomly and independently. In conclusion, these methods are variations on the same framework to gauge spatial concentration. This being the case, this typology can be useful for readers to choose the appropriate distance-based tool to answer their question.

The paper is organized as follows. In the first part, we give a quick presentation of the common framework and basic vocabulary. Then, all the available distance-based measures are introduced. The third part builds a typology of these methods, showing that they follow the same pattern but vary because they assume different theoretical choices. The last part is a discussion of each tool's properties and their relevance to address economic questions.

Section snippets

Basic principles

Before presenting distance-based measures in detail, we shall propose a general overview of the framework of these functions.

When studying the location of activities, economists document the spatial distribution of one kind of entity (points2), for example shops with a given activity. Their aim is to detect phenomena of attraction (also called aggregation, agglomeration, localization),

The g function

The second-order property of a point pattern characterizes the relation between points: attraction, repulsion or independence. It is defined as the ratio between the joint probability of finding two points in two places x and y, denoted λ(x,y)dxdy and the product of the probabilities of finding each of them. For practical purposes, this property is assumed to depend only on the distance between the points (as it does not change with direction, the point process is said to be isotropic). A

A typology of distance-based methods

In what follows, we shall prove that all of these functions can be built empirically following the same five steps. First, neighbors are counted around each point at or within a distance r; sometimes weights are summed instead. Second, an average number of neighbors n(r) is calculated. Third, n(r) is divided by a local reference z(r). In accordance with the typology of Brühart and Traeger (2005), we shall use the following vocabulary:

  • Topographic measures use space as their benchmark: the

Discussion

The aim of the previous section was to propose a common framework for understanding the construction of the most popular distance-based methods. In this section, we shall provide a discussion of those functions with the objective of addressing economic questions.

Conclusion

A decade ago, disproportionality methods such as the Gini or Ellison and Glaeser indices were classical tools for economists. Quite logically, methods were then developed to take advantage of the knowledge of the exact position of objects and solve issues linked to the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (Openshaw and Taylor, 1979). The first were statistics based on the distance of the nearest neighbor of points, after Clark and Evans (1954). They have been outdated by the distance-based measures of

Acknowledgements

We thank the editor, two anonymous referees and participants at the 61st Congress of the French Economic Association (Paris), Hotelling Seminar (Université de Paris-Sud / ENS Cachan) and the 12th International Workshop Spatial Econometrics and Statistics (Orléans, France). The second author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the LET (Université de Lyon, CNRS, ENTPE), IUT de Sceaux and AAP Attractivité 2014 (Université de Paris-Sud). This work has benefited from an “Investissement

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