Ankara Araştırmaları Dergisi (Dec 2018)
Location Preferences of Knowledge Intensive Business Services in Ankara Metropolitan Area
Abstract
The Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS), a subsector of the service sector, is an important merit for every country and every region’s economy as it creates a high added value. The KIBS sector improves the production, transportation, and transformation of knowledge, thus its most important output is innovation. The location preferences of the KIBS activities, which appear as one of the crucial sectors contributing to the city economy, must be considered an important issue. The overview of the international literature, emphasizes that KIBS activities are mainly concentrated in metropolises. In this context, it is important to understand the distribution, concentration and clustering patterns of the KIBS activities at the example of Ankara metropolitan city as a contribution to the national and international literature. This paper aims to analyze the location preferences of the KIBS firms in Ankara, therefore, the address-based analysis was applied to the KIBS firms to the neighborhood scale within the metropolitan area of Ankara. The data of KIBS firms were obtained from the Ankara Chamber of Commerce (ACC). In the study which is the basis of this paper, firstly the spatial distribution patterns of the KIBS firms in the Ankara region that were analyzed according to the KIBS activity subclasses with the ArcGis software program. Then, clustering patterns of the two KIBS subclasses; Professional and Technological KIBS were presented by applying the nearest neighborhood analysis and kernel density analysis in ArcGis program. These results show contrary to the overview of the international literature that the KIBS firms are predominantly concentrated in the central business district (CBD), however technological KIBS activities, are concentrated in Technology Development Zones outside the CBD.
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