Index System Of Urban Competitiveness:Theoretical Mechanisms And Empirical Test

With the continuous development of economic globalization, national and regional competition is increasingly reflected in competition between cities, and the competition is more and more intense, the urban competitiveness is undoubtedly a very important theoretical proposition. Since the1980s, scholars at home and aboard continuously push forward the research of urban competitiveness and also achieved some results. This paper reviews the history and current situation of urban competitiveness at home and abroad, on the basis of combing the theoretical system of city competitiveness at home and abroad, making many comprehensive comparison and theoretical development of studies on urban competitiveness, according to the practice of Chinese urbanization process and the feature of inter-city competition, building a set of urban competitiveness measure index system.Throughout the urban competitive theories of home and abroad, where most of the theory’s studies are from the city’s economic aggregate, the quality of urban economic development, urban economic flows to judge a city’s comprehensive competitiveness. but the common flaw of these theories is that the evaluation of city competitiveness is single and the result is not accurate, precisely the above reasons, this paper uses the city’s total economic output,the quality of the economy, economic flow to describe a city’s competitiveness and its result is more objective, comprehensive and accurate.At present, domestic and foreign scholars mainly use qualitative analysis to research urban competitiveness while few scholars use quantitative analysis of indicator data to do a relatively simple standardized processing. This paper is the first to use component analysis to test the theory of urban competitiveness mechanism. In this paper use the samples of15sub-provincial cities and focus on both horizontal and vertical dimension empirical test of Chengdu’s annual competitive situation between the year2005and2009.The results show that the Chengdu’s total competitiveness, urban quality competitiveness, urban traffic competitiveness and overall competitiveness should be improved.The main framework of this article:Part Ⅰ elaborated the background of the analyses of current urban competitiveness firstly; Secondly. to clarify the importance of researching urban competitiveness; thirdly; elaborated the article’s research methods; finally, to design the article’s research route.Part Ⅱ mainly review the researching results of urban competitiveness both domestic and foreign scholars and make some comparison and analysis. Then put forward theoretical system and its basic framework of urban competitiveness on this basis.Part Ⅲ introduces the concept、content and feature of urban competitiveness Then it comes up with the design philosophy of urban competitiveness index system, and specific structure of index system.Part Ⅳ is the empirical part of the article. Firstly, it describes the sample selection and index data processing method; Secondly, through principal component analysis concluded the competitiveness of city from the year2005to2009and all kinds of forces ratings in Chengdu. Finally, through empirical testing of impact factors of the competitiveness of the city of Chengdu.Part V is mainly based on the results of the fourth part analysis, which combined with the Chengdu environment and resource endowments to put forward the policy recommendations on how to improve the comprehensive competitiveness of Chengdu.