# 🗺️ The Economic Geography of Digital Production

UQO Working Paper No. 38 — Product Diversity, Regional Specialization, and the Hidden Structure of Quebec's Online Economy

TL;DR — A read-only snapshot (1 Nov 2026) of Fabri-Ka, an aggregator of Quebec online stores, gives 370 054 cleaned listings from 1 557 merchants in 17 administrative regions. Regional specialization is real at the level of which merchants sell online (merchant-equal Cramér's V 0.107 vs a store-reshuffle null of 0.075, p < 0.001) but vanishes once listing volumes are counted (trimmed-listing p = 0.46): a region's catalogue is mostly its largest merchants. Catalogue sizes are extremely skewed (Gini 0.85; top 10 % of stores hold 79 % of listings). Rarefied diversity is unrelated to regional population (ρ = −0.20, CI [−0.62; 0.34], n = 16). Matched products (precision 0.90–0.92) differ across merchants by a median 4.7 log points; region effects are jointly significant (wild-cluster-bootstrap p = 0.005) and resellers post lower prices than producers (p = 0.001). The ECI-type complexity indicator fails bootstrap validation at 17 × 20 and is withheld; the QDACI is published as components only. H6 (local-origin premium) is untestable at product level. Results are reported under the platform's rule-based category labels (46 % audited precision) and under a validated classifier (Amendment A-002).

# 📌 Status

# 🗂 Repository layout

CLAUDE.md                     mandate (verbatim)
config/settings.yaml          paths, seed 20261101, snapshot identity, regions
research/                     preregistration (frozen), decision log + amendments
reports/                      00_source_audit, phase2_data_audit, sample_flow, data_dictionary, model_inventory,
                              hypothesis_registry_{rule,model}, limitations, referee_1/2/3, referee_responses, reproducibility
literature/                   seed references, Crossref-verified metadata (142/143), evidence matrix, review notes, references.bib
data/raw/                     snapshot (not committed; provenance in README.md) · data/external/ public covariates + manifest
data/interim/, data/processed{,_model}/   parquet/csv intermediates per category labelling (not committed)
src/ingest  src/clean  src/features  src/models  src/validation  src/reports  src/literature  src/audit
experiments{,_model}/         JSON summary of every step; hypothesis registry
paper/                        main.tex, sections/, tables{,_model}/, figures{,_model}/, references.bib, main.pdf
tests/                        pytest invariants of the cleaned panel
logs/                         run ledger (jsonl, every API call with usage), output manifest (sha256), pipeline log

# ▶️ Reproduce

make env                                  # uv venv (Python 3.12) + pinned deps
make ingest clean match validate          # snapshot → parquet → samples → matching → audits (LLM labels are cached CSVs)
make features models robust tables figures paper          # rule labelling (preregistered)
WP38_LABEL=model make features models robust tables figures   # classifier labelling (A-002)
make test

Access requirements: the authorised snapshot in data/raw/fabrika-snapshot-20261101/ (owner export; not redistributed) and, only to regenerate annotations, OPENAI_API_KEY / ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in .env. External covariates re-download with make external from the URLs in data/external/manifest.json.

# ✅ Hypotheses — final status

See reports/hypothesis_registry_rule.md and reports/hypothesis_registry_model.md (generated).

# ⚠️ What this is not

Listings are posted offers of merchants located in a region; they are not sales, employment, output or product origin. The indicators describe observed online catalogues.