The Regional Agglomeration Of The Headquarters Economy And The Influencing Factors

With the development of the economic globalization trend, the structure ofmultinational corporations and major industries starts to change in term ofsectional separation: the manufacture link in the global value chain has beentransferred to the developing countries, while the superior links of the valuechain, such as the marketing center, research center and strategicmanagement center of the enterprise remained in the developed countries.The result of this separation was the arising of regional agglomeration of theheadquarters economy that was divided with the “body economy”. In recentyears, domestic and overseas scholars begin to show their concern with thedevelopment of the headquarters economy, doing a great deal of research onthe formation mechanism and influencing factors of the headquarters economy,which leads to many conclusions of significance. On the basis of the studydone by the precursors, the paper intends to analyze the headquarterseconomy in four parts:The first part of the paper is aimed to explain the formation mechanism ofthe headquarters economy through three dimensions of the global valuechains specialization—value-added chain, space spin-off transfer andgovernance model. First of all, the author argued that the unbalanceddistribution of the resource and added-value to different production links ofvalue chain is the inherent agent of the formation of the headquarter economy.And the global spatial separation of the different links in value chain, due to thedecline in the transaction cost and the governance cost, serves as thenecessary condition to bring about the headquarter economy. The third point isthat the net-based governance is the reason of forming the headquarterseconomy.The second part focuses on the internal law and formation process of the transfer and agglomeration of multinational corporations headquarters. On thefirst step, multinational corporations transfer the processing and assemble linkto the developing countries, and then transfer step by step the link of pivotalparts, the research center and marketing center which belong to the technicalsections. The regional headquarters is also to be transferred in the final period,while the global headquarters remained, more often than not, in the developedcountries.The third part of which the paper would analyze the factors that influencethe regional agglomeration of the headquarters economy, and try to constructthe evaluation framework in five aspects: basic conditions, market conditions,research and development ability, human settlement and related industrialbase. On the basis of the analysis of influencing factors, the researcher of thispaper makes an attempt to establish26specific indexes to assess regionalagglomeration of the headquarters economy according to the evaluationframework. At the same time,35main cities in China would becomprehensively evaluated in a way of factor analysis based on the indexes.Market conditions, living conditions, auxiliary service and human resourcesare common factors according to the result of data calculation. In the light ofthe common factors, a comparative analysis of the environmental condition ofthe35cities would be conducted in this part. The top four cities are Shanghai,Shenzhen, Beijing, and Guangzhou. Xiamen is in the13rd rank, and Fuzhou inthe19th.The fourth part of the paper makes a comparison between the externalenvironment in Fuzhou and Xiamen in four specific aspects—Marketconditions, living conditions, auxiliary service and human resources, andanalyzes respectively the developmental characteristics of the headquarterseconomy of the two cities. At the end of the paper, the author endeavors to putforward proposals for the headquarters economy of the two cities from fourangles—making full use of the geographical advantage in the cooperation withTaiwan, developing modern service industry, and improving human settlement.