Research Papers

Communities in an Inter-firm Network and their Geographical Perspectives

Japan Geography Society Collection of Abstracts

We detect communities, or groups of firms having a mutually close business relationship, in a huge inter-firm transaction network and study their geographical perspectives. We apply a random-walk based method proposed in network science for the community detection to a Japanese inter-firm network having around 0.7 million firms. We found that the community size follows a power-law distribution, and high-ranked communities in terms of size are non-localized nation-wide communities. Although the industrial proximity is generally important for community formation, whether the geographical proximity matters depends on the type of business. Localized communities tend to be medium-sized. We also shed light on the hierarchical structure of the community. We found that some of the nation-wide communities are divided into several localized sub-communities.

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