E-Capital and Economic Growth in European Metropolitan Areas: Applying Social Media Messaging in Technology-Based Urban Analysis

Juho Kiuru and Tommi Inkinen

Journal of Urban Technology, 2019, vol. 26, issue 2, 67-88

Abstract: Innovation is an elemental part of regional economic growth. In the past years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have enabled new means for data collection, and analysis for the study of regional innovation systems. This paper investigates innovation and technology messaging in Twitter, which has been described as the SMS of the Internet. The concept of electronic capital (e-capital) is applied in order to find out how technology messaging relates to the economic situation in metropolitan areas. The recently introduced concept of e-capital is cultivated from the conceptualizations of innovation acknowledging that different forms of capital, including human, social, and economic, circulate and have an effect on each other. The analysis indicates that clusters of e-capital and potential growth clusters are identifiable by using Twitter activity. In Europe, e-capital agglomerates to previously identified clusters of the “Blue Banana” and the “Golden Banana” (or the “Sun Belt”). Based on spatial statistics, we apply Categories of Metropolitan Areas (COMAs) in order to classify Twitter intensive locations across Europe. We defined four COMAs and estimated their e-capital potential. The most problematic COMA lies in Eastern Europe whereas the strongest concentration is found in Western Europe.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10630732.2019.1579513 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:cjutxx:v:26:y:2019:i:2:p:67-88

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjut20

DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2019.1579513

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Urban Technology is currently edited by Richard E. Hanley

More articles in Journal of Urban Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().