Measuring the decline of a Marshallian industrial district: the Birmingham jewellery quarter

This paper presents the findings of a study on the decline of a typical Marshallian industrial district: the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter in the UK. The paper contributes to the current debate on clusters’ life cycle by presenting a multidisciplinary methodology that combines historical and economic analyses with demography and organizational ecology models. The paper seeks to explore the patterns of firms’ birth and mortality rates, as well as firm density across branches of production activities to measure and understand the decline of the Jewellery Quarter over the last decades.