City size and competitiveness for the cities of São Paulo: a spatial statistics analysis

Resumen

The objective of this article is to develop a competitiveness index for the 645 cities of the state of São Paulo, Brazil (ICM-SP). We ranked cities according to the overall competitiveness index and each one of the five dimensions of competitiveness: urban/environmental, sociodemographic, fiscal/institutional, economic and innovation. Additionally, we performed an Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) in the ICM-SP. Our results show that cities with similar competitiveness levels tend to locate near each other, which show the presence of spatial clusters in the state of São Paulo. The cluster of cities with high competitiveness spill over from the São Paulo Metropolitan Region to the Campinas Metropolitan Region, reaching another cluster around Ribeirão Preto. Moreover, we found that cities with the highest competitiveness indexes are mostly midsized cities, in general part of metropolitan areas led by one or more large cities. Regarding the five dimensions of competitiveness, we noted that cities with high urban/environmental and sociodemographic competitiveness are composed mostly of medium sized cities. Smaller cities tend to perform better in the fiscal/institutional dimension, whereas larger and midsized cities tend to excel in the economic dimension. In the innovation dimension, we noticed a cluster of cities with high performance which spillover from São José dos Campos to São Paulo and to Campinas, plus another cluster surrounding Ribeirão Preto.