Criteria for Industrial Park Selection

In order to produce a meaningful benchmarking analysis of industrial parks, the project team began with a broad aim of including as many industrial parks as possible from around the world, however, we selected only those that have information published online and screened out those for which no information could be found.

Our primary sources of information on industrial parks were websites of the park or park authorities and industrial park directories compiled by government sources. Although industrial parks have various names including Special Economic Zones (“SEZ”), free economic zones, industrial zones, industrial clusters, export processing zones, etc., the project team chose to use “industrial park” and “industrial cluster” as generic and interchangeable terms for this study.

Industrial parks included in this study were selected based on the following criteria:

1.The park should have a certain continuous area and defined boundaries.

  • Small business parks or office parks were not included in the research.

2.The park should be focused on energy, manufacturing, chemical, pharmaceutical, and other industries focused on manufacturing goods.

  • Parks focused solely on providing services such as tourism, transportation, or logistics, were not included. Also, parks focused purely on research were not included.

3.The park should be governed by a management authority or/and be established by a government or local authority based on specific operating conditions. These conditions can include special tax or tariff regimes, access to certain infrastructure, or other incentives focused on attracting tenants to the park.

  • Some industrial zones do not have special conditions related to their operations, but they may be associated with some anchor business (for example, some ports or airports may have a number of key businesses associated with them); these parks or zones were not included in the research.

4.The park should be in active operation and de facto open for investment. Such parks advertise themselves online and try to attract international investment. Therefore, it was assumed that if the park is not found online and not available from any directories, it is inactive or not available for investment.

  • In a number of countries, parks or economic zones are declared but investments do not occur for various reasons. For example, Russia has 43 special economic zones, including 29 industrial zones, but they are de facto closed for international investment, while domestic investments are very limited. Such parks were not included in the research.