思想领袖简报系列：粤港澳大湾区的制造业优势

Specialisation of ManufacturingIndustries in the Guangdong-HongKong-Macau Greater Bay Area HKUST LI & FUNGSUPPLY CHAIN INSTITUTELSK Business BuildingThe Hong Kong University ofScience & TechnologyClear Water BayKowloon, Hong KongE: ustlfsci@ust.hk Dr. Sophie Zhang, Manager,HKUST Li & Fung Supply Chain Institute HIGHLIGHTS •Addresses the lack of recent studies enabling systematic,comparable analysis of industrial specialisation across Chineseregions. •Identifies specialised industries for each of the nine Guangdongcities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA)and for 31 Chinese provinces.•Each city in the GBA exhibits a distinct pattern of specialisedindustries, shaped by its unique industrial legacy and policyorientation, and together they contribute to a dynamic regionaldivision of labour.•Compared to the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), the GBA stands out forits specialisation in consumer-oriented industries that are moderatelytech- and capital-intensive, with a strong emphasis on productdesign and rapid response to shifting market demand. This reflectsthe region’s deep industrial roots as China’s pioneering export-oriented economy since the onset of reform and opening-up.•GBA specifically leads in one high-tech industry—the ICTequipment—accounting for over one-third of national sales, farexceeding Jiangsu’s 15% share (ranking second after Guangdong)and the YRD’s combined 28% share.•Lays a foundation for further research on the GBA's industrialdynamics, informing better regional and industrial policies. In many industries, leading firms are located in the same nation—oreven the same city or region within the nation, as Porter and othersproved.1The localisation of competitive advantage in certain industries and activities has prompted national and local governments to pursueindustry-proliferating regional development policies. However, MichaelEnright warns that without rigorous methods to identify and characteriseindustrial localisation, regional policies risk targeting the same industriesacross different places, rather than supporting strategies tailored to thespecific nature of local economies.2 The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA) has beena key driver of China’s economic growth since China’s reform andopening-up. Many scholars have examined various aspects of GBAindustrial development, such as development trajectories, technologicalupgrading, innovation, and industrial interconnection, using advancedtechniques and detailed historical materials.3However, few of thesestudies use disaggregated industrial data to identify industrialagglomerations or specialisations within the GBA that enable systematiccross-regional comparisons. This analysis addresses this gap in recent studies by applying a simpleyet powerful tool—location quotient analysis—to identify the industrialspecialisation in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), the Guangdong portion ofthe GBA, and the region as a whole, especially as compared with theYangtze River Delta (YRD), another major economic powerhouse ofChina. Location quotient (LQ) is a widely used tool in economic geography thatcompares a region’s share of a specific activity with its share of a broadaggregate.4Using LQ instead of the more widely known ‘market share’as the primary metric is because market share tends to bias againstsmaller economies or industries, limiting comparability across regions orsectors of different scales. Its threshold for specialisation is alsoarbitrary. Relying solely on market share to measure specialisation orcompetitiveness may, therefore, result in a few geographic unitsdominate most industries, or certain industries appear dominant acrossall geographic units. In contrast, LQ offers a more nuanced view,allowing finer differentiation of industrial specialisation among regions. Identify Industrial Localisation Using the latest available industrial output data across 31 manufacturingindustries at the city, provincial, and national levels, the study firstcalculates location quotients for each of the nine PRD cities by dividingan industry’s share in the city’s gross industrial output (GIO) by thesame industry’s share in Guangdong’s total GIO. Provincial-levellocation quotients are then computed by dividing each industry’s sharein provincial industrial sales by its corresponding share in the nationaltotal. An LQ greater than one indicates that a city or region is morespecialised in an industry than the provincial or national average, withhigher LQ values reflecting greater specialisation.5By combining LQswith industrial output shares, the study analyses the specific industrialcompetitiveness of PRD cities within the regional context, and of theGBA within the national context. The data used to calculate the LQs for PRD cities are the GIO ofindustrial enterprises above designated size in 41 secondary industries(including seven mining industries, 31 manufacturing industries, andthree utility industries) in nine PRD cities in 2023.