Firm Interactions and Potential Ecosystems: A Bottom-Up Approach to Territorial Network Analysis

Zoltan Elekes, Sandor Juhasz, Gergely Magyar, Balazs Lengyel and Gergo Toth

No 2613, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: Regional industry clusters enhance firm performance, yet the geography of firm-to-firm transactions underlying this advantage remains unclear. Using nationwide supplier-buyer and labour-flow networks constructed from Hungarian administrative data, we examine how the spatial reach of cluster and non-cluster firms’ supplier, customer, and labour connections relates to firm performance. We find that greater geographic reach in both networks is associated with better firm performance. Among cluster firms, better-performing firms reach more distant customers while drawing from more geographically proximate labour markets. Our findings reveal that the spatial structure of inter-firm networks is a key source of the cluster premium.

Keywords: supply chains; production networks; labour flows; regional clusters; firm performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-08, Revised 2026-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg2613.pdf Version August 2026 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:egu:wpaper:2613

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).