industrial policy, its spatial aspects and cluster development in ...

eporting of data. However, district rankings remain more or less unaffected.
include eight metropolitan cities and districts in Northern and Central Punjab. Figure
4.9 displays complete mapping of districts on the basis of the index for 2005-06 along
with development rank (in parenthesis) for selected districts. The three categories
include the most-developed districts, i.e., where the index is 1 standard deviation (SD)
above the mean, least-developed districts, i.e., where the index is 1 SD below the mean,
and the medium-developed districts that consist of all other districts. Again, we can
clearly see that investment in social infrastructure is highly concentrated in
metropolitan cities, big cities and their surrounding districts while districts located away
from these urban demand centers (e.g., southern Punjab, interior of Sindh and remotely
located districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan) are lagging behind. As
predicted by the literature on New Economic Geography, only the better ranked districts
(that have a pool of skilled workers) are concentrated by large-scale manufacturing
clusters (see Figure 4.10 based on plant level data from CMI 2005-06).
However, in least developed districts industry composition is determined by their
natural advantage in resource based industry, e.g., agro-based industries, handicrafts
and resource-based randomly scattered plants such as petroleum plants, sugar mills,
ginning factories, marble & minerals, and the like. Figure 4.11 displays that most
resource-based industry clusters are located in districts where the principal component
post-primary school system and hospital index (given in parenthesis) is at the lower end
of the distribution.
It is interesting to note that our human capital infrastructure based rankings of districts
closely overlap with two other recent studies (e.g., the development rank ordering of
districts by Wasti and Siddiqui (2008) and district-wise index of multiple deprivations
by Jamal et al. (2003). If any thing, these evidences help in understanding the
relationship between infrastructure development and growth and in determining the
areas of need.
318