The spillover effect of neighboring port on regional industrial diversification and regional economic resilience

Abstract

We examine the spillover effect of neighboring ports on regional industrial diversification and their economic resilience using the export data of South Korea from 2006 to 2020. First, we build two distinct product spaces of ports and port regions, and provide direct estimates of the role of neighboring ports as spillover channels spatially linked. This is in contrast to the previous literature that mainly regarded ports as transport infrastructure per se. Second, we confirm that the knowledge spillover effect from neighboring ports had a non-negligible role in sustaining regional economies during the recovery after the economic crisis but its power has weakened recently due to a loosened global value chain.