Theoretical Framework for Institutional Innovation in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area: A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Cross-Border Coordination Mechanisms

摘要

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) represents the world’s most ambitious endeavor to forge a unified economic region across three legal systems, two customs territories, and three currencies. This paper develops a multi-stage game-theoretic framework to demonstrate why market-driven integration alone proves insufficient and how targeted institutional innovation resolves coordination dilemmas among the 11 jurisdictions. We formalize the GBA as an asymmetric coordination game with heterogeneous players and prove that pure market forces yield multiple Nash equilibria, including a risk-dominant low-effort outcome characterized by chronic under-provision of institutional public goods. A “central coordinator + local benefit-sharing” mechanism combining fiscal transfers with joint development zones achieves the first-best cooperative outcome in subgame-perfect equilibrium, even amid differences in fiscal capacity, legal traditions, and development stages. Calibration using the Greater Bay Area Industry Development Index 2025 and HZMB mobility data (2025) shows that these mechanisms reduce effective adjustment costs for high-cost jurisdictions by 42–45 %, shifting the equilibrium from k ≈ 4–5 to k = 10–11. Policy simulations and case evidence from Qianhai and Hengqin highlight these zones as Pareto-improving innovations. Amid Guangdong’s GDP reaching RMB 14.58 trillion in 2025 (ranking first in China for the 37th consecutive year) and the GBA combined output surpassing RMB 15 trillion, these mechanisms have advanced the region from non-cooperative equilibria toward constrained efficiency, offering generalizable lessons for cross-jurisdictional integration globally.