Drawing indicators of economic performance from network topology: The case of the interregional road transportation in Greece

Abstract

Network science has provided new ways and effective methods in the modeling of communication systems. According to this discipline, systems of economic and spatial interaction are considered as spatial networks and are modeled into graphs. This approach allows studying transportation networks and other spatial networks of national and global economic importance in terms of graph theory and statistical mechanics and it can provide new insights for the structure and functionality of these systems, which are not visible through the prism of spatial and economic analysis. Within this context, this paper models the interregional road transportation network in Greece (GRN), a spatial network of prime economic importance for its country, into a geo-referenced primal graph and it discusses its geographical and topological features under the regional economics' perspective. The results show that GRN has a mesh (lattice-like) structure subjected to spatial constraints and that it is ruled by primary developmental dynamics, where many aspects of network topology are related to economic aspects of the road network. Overall, the paper highlights that measures of network topology are related to different aspects of the network's socio-economic framework and thus they can be considered as indicators of economic performance for this transportation network.