Network analysis reveals drivers of digital talent mobility across urban hierarchies, highlighting the role of city scale and public investment over salary effects.
This study examines digital talent mobility in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area using online public professional profiles from 2015 to 2024. Combining complex network analysis with a spatial autoregressive interaction model, it reveals global hub-to-hub links, a national diamond structure and a regional hierarchy, with Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macau playing differentiated roles. Urban scale drives attraction and retention of digital talents, while salary effects are unstable. Education-related public investment attracts talent more strongly in central cities, and research and development capacity mainly supports local retention. Distance decay and negative origin-destination dependence reveal persistent spatial friction and corridor-level competition.
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Yuanfang Chen (2026) studied this question.
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