China's Urban Resource-niche Research

In this new age of vehement competition, cities are increasingly important and the competition among them is increasingly together than ever. In the process of competition, those who holds much more resources, market, space, opportunity and those whose economy is much more developed will probably succeed. Faced with the above-mentioned competition, all urban governments must adopt certain development strategies to promote economics growth, and thus to obtain competitive advantages. In this thesis, theoretical analysis, combined with empirical test, is applied to study urban resource-niche(hereafter abbreviated as "URN" ); also an analysis not only on resource-niche (hereafter abbreviated as "RN" ) factors which influence and decide urban economics development but on the relationship between urban RN and economic development is given, which will help cities to understand their RN level, and thus enable them to adopt more reasonable development strategies to promote economic growth and to obtain competitive advantages.The thesis consists of four parts. In part I, general RN theory is introduced and based on which a theoretical frame for urban RN. In part II, the thesis selects 16variables including the quantity of labors to constitute the indicators system for measuring urban RN, as well as samples of 30 cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and so on. Then the thesis measures urban RN and every branch RN in every city by factor analysis, and the results indicate that the urban RN ranking coincides with the status of urban economy in cities. Also the results show that among all branch URN systems, the including human resource RN, capital RN, science &. technology RN and culture RN contributes most to urban comprehensive RN and thus plays a dominant role in deciding URN level. Part III,theoretical research along with empirical test is conducted on the relationship between URN and urban economic development. The results indicate demonstrate that there is positive correlation between URN and urban economic development as a whole. In part IV, RN corresponding measures for sustainable development of urban economy have been proposed based on related research.On the basis of predecessor' works, the thesis has brought forward the following breakthroughs: 1.Applying systematic analysis and measure analysis method, the thesis makes reasonable combination of the key RN indicators, which provides aprimary frame for studying URN. 2. A new indicator system is developed with reference to the constructed theoretical frame to measure URN.3. Never before is any research conducted on urban economy in terms of RN. Furthermore, using factor analysis the thesis gives a quantified study on URN, based on which an analysis on the relationship between URN and urban economic development has also been put forth.Owing to the complicated composition of URN, as well as many subjective and objective constraints such as difficulties in quantifying some variables, shortage of urban statistics and so on, there are some deficiencies in the study. For example, the thesis fails to select some accurate indicators to measure individual factors constituting URN; some variable that can't be quantified are still exclusive. The author will spare no efforts to further the research.