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| A NEW TREND IN REGIONAL ECONOMICS: RESEARCH ON REGIONAL ECONOMIC NETWORKS |
| SANG Man-cheng, QIN Cheng-lin |
| College of Economics, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China |
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Abstract Overseas scholars of Regional Economics introduce complex network theories and methods into the analysis of regional economy, open up regional economic network research in this new field and develop a network analysis path to explain regional economic phenomena and to reveal new economic laws. Currently, the economic network research mainly focus on four areas:exploiting complex network theories and methods to define and describe networks; studying the formation and evolution process of networks; revealing network effects in regional economic growth and development; analyzing the flow and diffusion of knowledge, technology and other production factors. Complex network theories provide a series of analytical tools for regional economic network analysis. Moreover, the network also exists between the co evolutions or in the evolution process of mutual influence. The existing regional economic theory emphasizes the role of scale economy in the regional economic growth. The scale economy also exist in network, mainly along with increase in the number of nodes and the network density, network productivity will double. Under certain conditions, the network effects can also be negative and lock-in effects will appear. In the analysis of network and diffusion of production factor, besides distance, network structure and relations play important roles in the diffusion of production factors, especially, knowledge and information. The small world network structure is proved to be the most efficient in the diffusion process of production factors. Generally speaking,the research of regional economic networks will reveal new sources for the regional economic growth and development and give new explanations to the imbalanced development. Also network research emphasizes the importance of network structure and network effects, which are good complementariness for regional economic research.
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Received: 24 June 2013
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2014, Vol. 29 
