Measuring Spatial Cluster for Leading Industries in Surakarta with Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA)

Economic clusters are significant to support the economic growth, particularly at regional scale. The approach in the analysis has evolved from the emphasis on the comparison between the intra and extra regional into the spatial approach that is capable to detect the prevailing movement and concentration pattern in particular economic activity, hence the generated data is more informative and analyzable. This paper concentrates in identifying the location and assessing the economic clusters of leading industries in Surakarta City, Indonesia based on the number of units and labor absorption by using the Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA). In association with the first objective, ArcGis was employed to find out how the concentration of leading industries in Surakarta was formed. The analysis revealed that the industries in Surakarta City have a propensity to be remote from downtown and concentrated in the northern part of the city. The second objective was revealed by performing the Moran’s index on GeoDa software to determine the spatial autocorrelation among the observed areas as the basis in finding the leading industrial cluster. The analysis indicated that all leading industries have relatively low Moran’s index meaning there was no dominant leading industry in Surakarta. These results have been confirmed by the LISA method to reveal the areas having spatial autocorrelation for each industrial sector