Project number: FK143064
The general question taken up in this project is at the core of regional science: why are some regions more vulnerable to external shocks and able to develop new growth paths than others? This is crucial to understand as diminishing economic opportunities and welfare provisions in many regions already led to growing social tension even before the pandemic. Hence, substantial attention in academia and policy has been directed recently towards the notion of regional resilience, thus putting emphasis on regions being able to adapt their economic structures in an environment that is constantly evolving. Still, although regions are collections of networked individuals, firms and industries, our understanding is limited on how these network structures are connected to the resilience of regions. In this project we address this issue by drawing insights from network science, and by deploying a unique dataset on firm supplier networks in Hungary for 2016-2023.
Specifically, we will reconstruct supplier networks between firms and industries. Then we will first explore the spatial structure of inter-industry supplier networks, and their connection with regional productivity and specialisation. In this stage we will also provide information to policy on existing economic competences and prospective new industries in Hungarian regions. Second, we will measure the robustness of firm supplier networks within and across regions, and show how this relates to the resilience of regions in terms of economic performance during crisis. Third, we will study how typical ways of developing new growth paths in regions makes their economic structure more or less vulnerable to economic shocks.
