Geographical Research, Volume. 39, Issue 9, 2029(2020)
The contemporary research of measuring regional economic resilience tends to focus on GDP index, while lacks of considering the other dimensions. Meanwhile, it overlooks the impacts from extra-regional linkage. Therefore, this study takes the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) as an example to measure the economic resilience based on five selected economic indicators, namely, GDP, gross export value, industrial added value, total retail sales of consumer goods, and number of the unemployed. Drawing upon the Resis index proposed by Martin and Gardiner in 2019, this paper calculated the relative resilience of cities in GBA. The result showed that Shenzhen has the best resilience, Guangzhou and Foshan ranked second, followed by Dongguan and Zhuhai. In contrast, Hong Kong and Macao have the worst resilience. This paper then explains the causes of regional divergence through the perspective of relational economic geography. It is argued that strategic coupling plays an important role in shaping the intra-regional divergence of resilience in the GBA. The main conclusions are as follows: First, single dimension shows limitations in depicting regional economic resilience, while multi-dimensional indicators reveals a distinctive divergence among different types of regional economic resilience. Second, intra-regional divergence of economic resilience in the GBA has been developed, which is not relevant to location and the GDP scale, but is more related to industrial economic structure and modes of embeddedness in global production networks. Third, strategic coupling can explain the intra-regional divergence. Shenzhen has been benefited from absorptive coupling with the best resilience, while Guangzhou and Foshan cities are in the medium, and Hong Kong and Macao have the worst resilience due to captive coupling with global financial and hotel networks. This paper contributes the literature with a fresh empirical case of regional resilience in the GBA and also provides an alternative theoretical framework that involves extra-regional linkages into analysis. This paper calls for more attentions of qualitative research on regional economic resilience in future, in terms of the variety of resilience from economic to social dimensions and causal mechanism of how resilience is fostered and exerts power in resistance of the shock, particularly in relation to extra-regional linkage in the contemporary global economy.
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Yi LIU, Jiehan JI, Yifan ZHANG, Yu YANG.
Received: May. 18, 2020
Accepted: --
Published Online: Apr. 23, 2021
The Author Email: YANG Yu (yangyu@igsnrr.ac.cn)