Revealing spatial spillover effect in high-tech industry agglomeration from a high-skilled labor flow network perspective

TL;DR

This paper examines how high-skilled labor flows influence high-tech industry clustering across cities, revealing significant spatial spillover effects driven by labor mobility, government investment, education, and foreign investment, especially in the Yangtze River Delta.

Contribution

It introduces a novel inter-city high-skilled labor flow network and integrates it into spatial econometric models to analyze spillover effects on high-tech industry agglomeration.

Findings

Spatial spillover effects are significant in high-tech industry development.

Higher high-skilled labor flows strengthen spillover effects among cities.

Local government investment and foreign direct investment influence spillover dynamics.

Abstract

Understanding the high-tech industrial agglomeration from a spatial-spillover perspective is essential for cities to gain economic and technological competitive advantages. Along with rapid urbanization and the development of fast transportation networks, socioeconomic interactions between cities have been ever-increasing, traditional spatial metrics are not enough to describe actual inter-city connections. High-skilled labor flow between cities strongly influences the high-tech industrial agglomeration, yet receives less attention. By exploiting unique large-scale datasets and tools from complex network and data mining, we construct an inter-city high-skilled labor flow network, which was integrated into spatial econometric models. Our regression results indicate that spatial-spillover effects exist in the development of high-tech industries in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration region. Moreover, the spatial-spillover effects are stronger among cities with a higher volume of high-skilled labor flows than among cities with just stronger geographic connections. Additionally, we investigate the channels for the spillover effects and discover that inadequate local government expenses on science and technology likely hamper the high-tech industrial agglomeration, so does the inadequate local educational provision. The increasing foreign direct investments in one city likely encourages the high-tech industrial agglomeration in other cities because of the policy inertia toward traditional industries.