Study On The Development Of Qingdao Port-centered Industry Cluster

In recent years, industry cluster has developed into a characteristic way of economic organization in the world economy and becomes the highlight of the regional economics research. The enterprises in the cluster cooperate with each other and reach the economics of scale and the economics of range. This could lead to the effect of spillover and push the economic development of the region and the whole country, so the waterfront area could attract the relative industries to agglomerate around with the condition of geographical advantage and maritime transportation advantage, and then get fast economic growth. The innovation of this thesis is to combine the industry cluster theory and development of port-centered industry, and apply it to empirical research to analyze the port-related industry cluster development of Qingdao.This paper presents an analysis of the formation condition, current situation, and regional economic impact of port-centered industry cluster of Qingdao, with qualitative method and quantitative method. Some valuable suggestions are given to improve the development of port-centered industry cluster.There are five chapters in this paper. The first chapter is the theoretical analysis. A company chooses to locate in the waterfront, because of reducing logistics cost, enhancing its ability to use the worldwide production factors. The competitive port-centered industry clusters would improve the innovation ability and the whole local economic vigor by build-up effect and diffusing effect.The second chapter introduces the cases of the well known port-centered industry clusters at home and abroad, such as Japan, Rotterdam City, Singapore. Learning from their successful experiences, Qingdao should make prospective port industrial planning, speed up port construction, and choose manufacturing/petrochemical industry/steel industry, as leading industries. The qualitative analysis is in the third chapter. SWOT method is used to list the internal conditions and external environment of port-centered industry cluster development of Qingdao. The main waterfront is Qingdao Economic & Technical Development Area, where there are six mature port-centered industry clusters.The next chapter is the quantitative analysis part. LQ (location quotient) method is applied to calculate the aggregation degree of the port-centered industry clusters, and GRA (Grey Relation Analysis) method is used to measure the contribution degree from leading port-centered industry clusters to the GDP of Qingdao.Based on the study in the former chapters, the paper gives some suggestions of developing port-centered industry clusters of Qingdao.