Investigation of the Productivity of Networking Activities and Improvement Projects on the Sales and Employment of Iranian Agricultural Clusters

O ne of the effective strategies for economic development of clusters is the conduct of networking activities by cluster members. Indeed, the majority of cluster members are micro and small enterprises, so, should attempt to overcome their inherent constraints and influence the market through networking activities. In addition, these enterprises lack an intra-firm research and development unit due to their limited financial and knowledge resources. Therefore, the execution of improvement projects by the BDSs situated in clusters plays an undeniable role in the development of clusters. Given the important role of networking activities and improvement projects in the economic development of industrial clusters, this study aims to investigate the efficiency of Iranian agricultural clusters in using these two important input factors, namely networking activities and improvement projects. In this regard, the final outputs, including the total sales and employment rates will be examined so that some strategies and guidelines can be offered to policy makers for the development of these clusters. DEA has been used to evaluate the effectiveness of networking activities and improvement projects in the performance of the six Iranian agricultural clusters under study. Based on the results obtained from the analyses, some solutions were suggested to promote the effectiveness of networking activities and improvement projects.