Closed or connected? The economic geography of technological collaboration between special economic zones in China’s Suzhou-Wuxi-Changzhou metropolitan area

ABSTRACT Conceived as industry enclaves when they were originally built, China’s special economic zones (SEZs) might be thought to have few linkages to the local economy. Here we investigate whether SEZs exceed industry enclaves by bringing the literature on the geography of innovation into dialogue with that on industry enclaves. Drawing upon detailed information on the geographical boundaries of these SEZs and a database of geocoded Chinese patents, we analyse the economic geography of technological collaboration between SEZs in China’s Suzhou-Wuxi-Changzhou (SWC) metropolitan area. Overall, we find that: (1) enterprises in SEZs account for 55.6% of the region’s total patents and 75.4% of its co-patents; (2) knowledge linkages within and between SEZs in the SWC metropolitan area are quite limited and most of the knowledge linkages are beyond the region; and (3) there is considerable heterogeneity between SEZs in terms of their knowledge linkages, with multinational and domestic enterprises playing different roles.