Abstract: Cultural industry agglomeration can not only promote the transformation and upgrading of urban industries but also help to improve the urban cultural taste and competitiveness. Based on a theoretical analysis, this paper for the first time makes use of the data from China’s 35 large and medium cities during 2003-2011 to explore the influencing factors of urban cultural industry agglomeration. The results show that there exist some regional differences in the impacts of various factors on the urban cultural industry agglomeration: (1) industrial structure, human capital and industrial policy have promoted the cultural industry agglomeration in western cities, but have no significant impact on eastern and central cities; (2) industrial diversity has a positive impact on the cultural industry agglomeration in eastern and central cities, but has no significant impact on western cities. Industrial specialization has restrained cultural industry agglomeration in eastern cities, while promoted cultural industry agglomeration in the central and western cities; (3) infrastructures have no significant impact on the urban cultural industry agglomeration. Therefore, different cities should formulate the cultural industry strategy suitable for themselves, so as to avoid blind copies and the “one size fits all” policy tendency.

Key words: cultural industry; industry agglomeration; spatial externality; specialization; diversity