The Effect Of Intellectual Factors On Metropolitan Region's Competitiveness

With the development of economic globalization and regional integration, the competition between nations and regions gradually changes into the competition between cities, particularly between the big influential cities, and mega-cities. And in today, the metropolitan region's competition is no longer a single inter-city competition, but mainly the competition between the metropolitan areas with a big city centered at the core. Metropolitan area's international competitiveness becomes an important symbol of a country's or regional's social development and sustainable development. As a new main subject in regional competition, metropolitan region's sources of competitive advantages have become the object of study. In this paper, considering the domestic and foreign competitiveness theories and specific subject of metropolitan areas, we propose that the competitiveness of metropolitan area means a metropolitan area compared with other metropolitan area, in participating in the international competition, has a comparative advantage in the areas of allocation of resources, integration of elements and sustainable development. Further more, we suggest economic and financial strength, industry clusters, opening to the outside world, infrastructure, and knowledge of the elements as five important elements to the competitiveness of metropolitan area.In the era of knowledge economy, knowledge management has moved from the area of enterprise gradually be extended to national and regional levels. More and more scholars started to value the important role of the intellectual factors to enhance the competitiveness of the metropolitan area; therefore, this article will focus on the study of knowledge elements. Firstly, this paper referred to advanced national and regional intellectual capital management theories and research experience abroad, considering metropolitan area as the particular subject, constructs a measuring index system of intellectual factors; secondly, this paper calculates the intellectual factors'development level of China's eleven major metropolitan areas; finally, through the systematic comparison of the development level of these metropolitan area's intellectual factors and its relationship with the competitiveness, this paper finds that intellectual factors explain 2/5 of metropolitan area's competitiveness, more over, factors of human resources, technical factors, market factors and process factors play an important role in the knowledge wealth of a metropolitan area, which highlights the strategy to build the intellectual factors to enhance the competitiveness of a metropolitan area. This conclusion provides a theoretical basis to help the Government to efficiently manage its intangible resources.