Abstract

This paper explores the role of Specialized Towns in regional development and territorial specialization in Guangdong, China. The scope of the analysis is to identify territorial specialization through a measure of policy intensity (based on the number of Specialized Towns for each sector) and to explores the relation between policy incentives and the economic performance of territories. Moreover, we calculated a measure of entropy at the prefecture level to estimate the degree of relatedness among the Specialized Towns. We discovered so far that the effect of related specialization at the policy level may have a limited effect on territorial development.