Disentangling Regional Diversification: Identifying Theoretical and Empirical Challenges Through Complex Networks

Abstract

Regional diversification has been positioned as a topic of great interest among researchers of economic geography, however, there remain some research gaps that must be attended to. Through the use of complex networks analysis from this literature in a period from 1975 to 2022, we identify some methodological and theoretical issues related to its measurement methods, the lack of an integrative framework and ontology, a social structure few integrated and mostly constituted by researchers of the global north, and scarce attention to the relationship between diversification and its long-term consequences for regional development.