Abstract:

The current research on regional collaboration lacks the research perspective of global production network, which makes it difficult for the research on the collaboration of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to recognize the differences in the development of strategic coupling modes of various cities in the Greater Bay Area, and to clarify the differences in the status and division of labor of these cities in the global production network. These differences are the key to the coordinated development of the Greater Bay Area. Therefore, based on the theoretical framework of the global production network, this study uses the variable of strategic coupling to analyze the development of the strategic coupling mode of the cities in the Greater Bay Area and the differences in their status and division of labor in the global production network, so as to further understand the coordinated development of the Greater Bay Area. There are three main findings in this study. First, the strategic coupling mode and evolution process of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao are essentially different, belonging to different global production networks. Hong Kong has experienced two processes of dependency coupling to decoupling in the development of local manufacturing and the later "having stores in front and factories behind" mode, forming a mutually beneficial coupling mode in the financial industry. Macao has experienced two processes from dependency coupling to decoupling in the manufacturing industry, forming an absorption coupling mode in the gambling industry. Second, there are also significant differences in the strategic coupling modes of cities in the Pearl River Delta. Each city is embedded into different global production networks through different leading industries. Third, under the influence of the strategic coupling differences of the above two scales, the regional economy of the Greater Bay Area does not gradually move toward coordinated development, but presents the characteristics of less connection-collaboration-collaborative difficulties. The core argument of this paper is that the differences of strategic coupling mode lead to the embedding of cities into global production networks with significant differences in economic cycles, production systems and technological structures, making it difficult to achieve the overall regional collaboration. And the contribution of this study is that with the help of the global production network theory, it provides a new interpretation perspective for regional collaboration research, reveals the difficulties of regional collaboration in the Greater Bay Area, enriches the study of the long-term dynamic evolution of relational economic geography, and provides some suggestions for the formulation of collaborative policy.

Key words: economic globalization, Global Production Network, strategic coupling, regional collaboration, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area