Abstract

The evolutionary economic geography strand’s emphasis on related diversification as a path for economic development generally leads to greater territorial polarization: places already at the vanguard of production and with more advanced sectors tend to perform better, while less developed, often peripheral places remain stuck in low competitive equilibria. More recently, literature reveals cases where countries/regions may deviate and jump into new, unrelated industries, which have the potential to generate growth and convergence. Nonetheless, we still know little about what happens after jumps into unrelated industries and what factors facilitate the development of such industries. This issue is important, since it is often difficult for unrelated industries to take advantage of local competences and resources, or unfriendly environments. Our first contribution is thus to fill this gap by examining how unrelated industries could survive in an unfriendly environment. Another contribution is to bring the network properties of the industry space to the forefront, and show that unrelated and related industries have distinct preferences in terms of the number and strength of links. The hypothesis is that unrelated industries with a small of number of strong links tend to have better economic performance, while related industries with a large number of weak links are more likely to grow rapidly. We also contribute to the current literature methodologically by developing a new variety indicator that complements the density indicator. The econometric results confirm our main hypothesis.

摘要

演化经济地理学界强调将相关多样化作为经济发展的途径，通常会导致更大的地域两极分化：已经处于生产先锋地位且拥有更先进行业的地方往往表现更好，而欠发达，经常处于边缘地位的地方仍然陷于低谷竞争均衡。最近，文献揭示了一些国家/地区可能偏离并跳入新的，不相关的行业的情况，这些行业有可能促进增长和趋同。尽管如此，我们仍然不知道跳入无关行业之后会发生什么，以及哪些因素促进了此类行业的发展。这个问题很重要，因为不相关的行业通常很难利用本地的能力和资源，或者不友好的环境。因此，我们的第一项贡献就是通过研究不相关的行业如何在不友好的环境中生存来填补这一空白。另一个贡献是使行业空间的网络属性走在了最前列，并表明不相关和相关的行业在链接的数量和强度方面具有不同的偏好。假设是，联系数量少的不相关产业往往具有较好的经济绩效，而联系数量少的相关产业则更有可能快速增长。我们还通过开发与密度指标互补的新品种指标，在方法上为当前文献做出了贡献。计量经济学结果证实了我们的主要假设。