Regionalization of the Digital Economic Space: Contours of Emerging Approaches

An inhomogeneous economic space, representing a multitude of interactions between geographically distributed economic agents, can be differentiated into a number of districts. The experience of economic regionalization has approximately 260 years. However, this experience is poorly used in the transition to the digital economy and the analysis of the digital economic space formed as a result of the digital interaction of economic agents. There is no generalization of research on the differentiation of such a space in world science. Therefore, the purpose of our research was to generalize the world experience of regionalization of the digital economic space in order to identify emerging approaches and clarify existing problems and possible prospects. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to solve the following tasks: to identify the world array of publications on the subject under consideration; to conduct a comparative analysis of the identified publications with their subsequent grouping into approaches; to assess the possibilities and limitations of each approach; to outline the prospects for further research. About forty journal articles on the regionalization of the digital economic space have been identified in eight bibliographic databases using the author’s semantic search algorithm. A comparative analysis of these articles led to the conclusion that all of them are grouped into six approaches according to the method of allocation of districts: autocorrelation, cluster, comparative geographical, streaming, agglomeration and platform. The ideas underlying each approach are presented, as well as the main advantages and disadvantages. Prospects for further research may be related to the solution of the identified problems. As a result of comparing the array of articles with the experience of economic regionalization, five promising areas have been identified that go beyond the existing approaches