Redai dili (Apr 2023)
Spatial Agglomeration, Industrial Networks, and Their Effects on Strategic Emerging Industries in China
Abstract
As an important force to guide future economic and social development, strategic emerging industries are the core of China's modern industrial system that helps in achieving high-quality economic development. The study sample includes 1,109 most representative listed enterprises in strategic emerging industries and their associated 19,540 enterprises. This study has depicted the characteristics of the spatial distribution of China's strategic emerging industries from the perspectives of industrial clustering and industrial networks and provides an in-depth analysis of cluster structure, network centrality, network heterogeneity, and their spatial differentiation. This study has four main findings. First, in the eastern region, the core and supporting enterprises of strategic emerging industries are relatively balanced and the industry clusters are more complete, while in the central and near-western regions, there are relatively few core enterprises and they are mainly concentrated in a few provincial capitals. In the northwest and northeast regions, there are not enough core and supporting enterprises to support the development of strategic emerging industry clusters. Second, China's strategic emerging industry network has a diamond-shaped network pattern with the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, and Chengdu-Chongqing regions at the apex, and several vertically linked industry networks that have been formed by core cities. Third, the core companies' key investments in China's strategic emerging industries are concentrated in three key segments of the industry chain: manufacturing, R&D, and information (20.42%, 19.50%, and 17.56%, respectively). Based on this, two major industrial networks-the R&D and information services network and the manufacturing network and three national hubs-Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai, were formed. Beijing is the core node of the R&D and information services network, whereas Shenzhen and Shanghai are the core nodes of the production and manufacturing networks. In addition, Hangzhou is gradually becoming an information service center city with national influence, while Guangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, and Xi'an remain regional information service centers and manufacturing leading centers. Finally, there is a significant positive correlation between the size of industry agglomerations and the centrality of the industry network. When the cluster size is small, cluster size expansion primarily supports the expansion of the breadth of industrial network linkages, whereas when the cluster size is large, it primarily supports the increase in linkage intensity. More importantly, when industry agglomerations reach a certain size, the rapid increase in the strength of industrial network linkages is more often due to small and medium-sized supporting enterprises than due to large core enterprises. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics and spatial patterns of China's strategic emerging industries as well as the problems faced by different regions. Moreover, an analysis of the heterogeneity of industrial networks, especially the differences between the core node cities of different networks, also demonstrates the variability of the impact of different types of industrial networks on different cities and regions.
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