The Evolution Of The Networks Among Development Zones And Its Effect On Regionalization

The potential of the cooperation among development zones was narrow at the initial stage of their development,as a result of the rapid expansion of the development zones and the fierce competition among them.Yet in recent years,development zones have been facing a few challenges such as the limited land resources and the need for industrial restructuring.Against this backdrop,these development zones have been starting to interconnect to each other,with the forms of policy cooperation,industrial transfer and industrial cooperation.This may be a future direction of the transformation for these development zones.Moreover,as a spatial container of urban industrial agglomeration,development zones have both the intention and the capacity to promote regional integration and can thus play a key role in this process.The above phenomena and possibilities have received some attention in academic studies and practice.However,the existing literature still rarely investigate the structure and the dynamics of the networks among development zones.Also,these studies rarely conduct systematic empirical research to test the relationship between the networks among development zone and regional integration.In this context,this study aims to supplement the current research by answering the following questions.First,are there any networks among the national economic and technological development zones in the Yangtze River Delta region,and what are the forms of these networks? Second,how are the networks evolve? Third,what are the relationships between the evolution of the networks and the integration of the Yangtze River Delta region?To this end,this dissertation uses the sample of the 56 national economic and technological development zones in the 27 cities of the Yangtze River Delta region to produce the networks among these development zones at two levels,i.e.,management committee level and firm level.The former is based on the interactions and visits between management committees,and the latter is based on either the connections between branches or the connections between headquarter and branches.On this basis,using the method of descriptive analysis of dynamic networks,the stochastic actororiented model and the temporal exponential random graph model,we describe the evolution and its driving factors of the networks.Subsequently,the relative price variance method was used to measure the degree of regional integration in the Yangtze River Delta,whose relationship with the above networks was tested with panel regression.The empirical study shows that the cross-border networks among the national economic and technological development zones in the Yangtze River Delta region have been formed,and they significantly affect regional integration.More specifically,we have discovered the following phenomena.(1)At the management committee level,the network among development zones have been divided into a few groups that are latterly interconnected with each other,but the boundary effect can always be observed.Also,the network has been becoming increasingly concentrated,and the development zones with high degree distributing in cities such as Hefei,Suzhou and Ningbo.Finally,the evolution of the network is affected by factors such as transitive effects,provincial administrative boundaries,and the difference of size between two development zones.(2)At the firm level,the degree of interconnection of the networks among development zones have also been rising,especially after 2015,and the networks are more interconnected than the network at the management committee level.Also,more inter-provincial connections can be observed,indicating that the border effect is relatively weak.Besides,the networks are also more concentrated and the development zones with a high degree are mainly distributed in southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang,rather than in areas such as Anhui Province.Also,the result shows that the evolution of the networks is mainly affected by factors such as the administrative level of the city where the development zone is located and the consistency of the leading industries among the development zones.(3)The networks at the two levels both have a significant negative impact on the segmentation of the labour and commodity market in the Yangtze River Delta to varying degrees,and this result is relatively stable.Also,as an important factor of production,the market segmentation of labour is more obviously affected by the networks than that of commodities.Finally,the influence of different networks on the market segmentation has different degrees of time decay or time lag.According to the above findings,it should be considered to further optimize the structure of the networks among development zones,e.g.,strengthening the crossprovincial connections in the network at the management committee level,and promoting the expansion of firm-level networks to areas such as Anhui Province.Besides,it is also advised that as an approach to regional integration,the construction of the networks among development zones should be included in various regional plans.