Influencing Factors And Promotion Strategies Of Urban Consumption Under The New Development Pattern

Since 2014,consumption has continuously become the primary driving force for China's economic growth.Under the background of the current economic transformation entering a critical stage,the huge impact of COVID-19 and the complex and changeable international environment,the Central Committee of the CPC at the core of Comrade Xi Jinping put forward a new development pattern of dual circulation(NDP)at the right time,and pointed out that we should build a new development pattern of domestic and international dual circulation.In the face of the fact that the energy of international circulation is obviously weakened,and the vitality of domestic circulation is increasingly strong,taking expanding domestic demand as the strategic basis and promoting consumption as the core content of double circulation is not only a strategic choice in line with the internal essence of NDP,but also an inevitable requirement of China's economic development in the new era.As an important spatial carrier of consumption agglomeration,city has become the key node and important hub to build an NDP.How to effectively expand domestic demand,improve consumption function and smooth circulation system has become an important issue of urban development.The NDP points out the direction of urban consumption development in the new period and puts forward higher requirements.First of all,it puts forward higher requirements for the supply capacity of urban consumption.Supply capacity is the inner basis of urban consumption.Whether a city can provide high-quality and diversified goods and services is the decisive factor in whether it can transform demand into consumption.At present,the consumption supply capacity of many cities cannot meet the upgrading changes of consumption demand.Therefore,in order to realize the consumption cycle,the supply side of urban consumption needs to be reformed first.Secondly,the NDP puts forward higher requirements for the external conditions of urban consumption.Under the trend of increasing spatial mobility,the development of urban consumption not only needs to pay attention to the expansion of local demand,but also to attract foreign demand,so as to promote the spatial expansion and flow of urban consumption.However,the current spatial segmentation of regional consumption still exists.Therefore,how to break the space barrier has become an urgent problem to be solved in promoting the consumption flow.Thirdly,the NDP puts forward higher requirements for the spatial system of urban consumption.From the perspective of the comparative advantages and endowment characteristics of cities,cities have cooperation and complementarity in consumption development;from the perspective of the spatial flow of consumption,there is also greater competition and inequality between cities.Therefore,how to coordinate differences and alleviate unevenness is an important issue for realizing a virtuous circulation of consumption in space.In order to solve the above problems,this article follows the logic of “current situation analysis-internal function improvement-external conditions improvementnetwork system construction”,taking the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River as an example to study the development of urban consumption.The main work and findings of this paper can be divided into the following four aspects:First,analyze the urban consumption development trend and network pattern from the overall perspective.Wuhan,Changsha and Nanchang are the three cities with the highest level of economic development in urban agglomerations in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River.Their consumption related indicators rank in the middle of the major cities in China,reflecting that their overall levels of consumption need to be greatly improved.The internal consumption of urban agglomerations continued to grow from 2010 to 2019,but there are significant spatial differences,and the proportion of the tertiary industry still needs to be increased.From a dynamic perspective,this paper studies the consumption flow between cities in urban agglomeration from three aspects:node,hierarchy and cluster structure by using the China Union Pay data.It is found that there is a significant spatial segmentation of consumption flows within urban agglomerations,and consumption linkages are mainly established between cities in the same province,but there is very little cross-provincial consumption;The consumption that flows out to other regions is mainly concentrated in first-tier cities such as Shanghai,Beijing,and Guangzhou,and relatively close cities such as Tianjin,Hefei,and Hangzhou;the consumption that flows out of the Chinese mainland is mainly concentrated in countries and regions along the eastern Pacific such as Hong Kong region,Macau region,Japan,and Thailand,reflecting that economic development and proximity are important factors affecting consumption flows.Second,the paper studies the improvement of urban consumption function from the perspective of inside of the city.Amenity is a systematic concept of various facilities and environments that can bring comfort experience to residents.With consumption becoming the primary driving force of economic growth,the construction of urban facilities also needs to be inclined to consumption.This article first builds an evaluation index system for the level of urban comfort from the five aspects of nature,business,culture,transportation and society.The measurement results show that there are large spatial differences in the level of amenity in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River.This difference is mainly reflected in the commercial amenity,while the cultural,social and natural comfort levels are low.Then,this article explores the mechanism and its actual impact of amenity on urban consumption from the two dimensions of supply and demand by constructing intermediary effect models.The results show that the level of amenity can promote the supply of urban consumption by increasing the number of enterprises.However,the increase in the number of enterprises has not been accompanied by the optimization of the industrial structure,which is one of the shortcomings needed to further improve the urban consumption function.In addition,amenities have a significant effect in attracting short-term visits of non-local populations.They can promote the expansion of urban consumer demand by stimulating population consumption and expanding population size,but cultural and social amenities have less influence on attracting consumers from other places.Third,this paper studies the influencing factors of consumption flow from the perspective of outside of the city.First,by constructing a two-variable binary model,the consumption flow is divided into two consecutive behavior links: population flow and off-site consumption and explore the reasons for inter-city consumption flow from the perspective of step-by-step decision-making.The study found that distance is one of the factors hindering population flow and inter-city consumption,and transportation development can alleviate the negative effects of distance to a certain extent.Cultural differences are an important factor that affects the direction of population flow and consumption choices.Although the improvement of education level helps promote people's willingness to consume across regions,it has not been able to reverse the adverse effects of cultural differences.The development of the tertiary industry,especially the tourism industry,is not yet sufficient,which limits the increase in the attractiveness of external consumption.Then,the paper analyzes the spatial segmentation of consumption by building the boundary effect model.From the provincial level,the inter-provincial boundary has a negative barrier effect on the flow of inter-city consumption,and it has a protective effect on the local consumption of the city.From a city-level perspective,about half of the city boundaries have a positive mediating effect on inter-city consumption flows.The deviation of the boundary effect at the provincial and municipal scales makes the consumption of urban agglomerations ultimately affected by the barrier effect of the inter-provincial boundary,resulting in spatial division.Fourthly,the analysis of urban consumption situation during the period of COVID-19.What is the impact of urbanization on consumption under the spread of COVID-19?Do cities with higher urbanization rates recover faster in consumption during the postepidemic period? Around these problems,this paper studies the consumption recovery effect of urbanization from three aspects: time stage,industry classification and regional differences.The study found that only a few industries are less impacted by the epidemic,such as general department stores,cultural and sports entertainment,digital office,etc.However,the lack of Internet facilities and logistics services in cities of Hubei province restricts the online consumption in these industries.From a spatial perspective,the recovery speed of large cities is lower than that of small and mediumsized cities.Reasons may be that urban development in the past has been overly pursuing the accumulation of economic resources and the expansion of scale,while the development of soft elements such as public services has been lagging behind.Under the impact of the COVID-19,this structural contradiction has been magnified.Therefore,in the future,urban decision-makers should pay more attention to the improvement of service functions and other soft elements,which is a necessary measure to enhance economic resilience and improve risk prevention capabilities.Finally,based on the above analysis,this paper discusses the construction of a consumption network system with the focus of consumption center cities.In the current critical period of economic transformation and post epidemic revitalization,the construction of an international consumer center city is not only to boost consumption and promote long-term economic development,but also to break through the development bottleneck and accelerate the construction of domestic and international double cycle.In the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River,Wuhan and Changsha have the potential to build international consumption centers.Nanchang,Yichang,Xiangyang and Zhuzhou should take the construction of regional consumption centers as a reasonable goal,while other cities should also actively integrate into the wave of consumption development and build themselves into local consumption cities with distinctive advantages.Then,a high quality,multi-level and diversified consumption network system of in this region will be formed.