Construct Validity Research On China’s Regional Competitiveness

Regional competitiveness indicates the power of a country or district which involves markets、resources and technology in competition. Many aspects are involved in analyzing competitive power. With the development of our economy, more and more people focus on the research of regional competitiveness. But most scholars pay more attention on the theory of competitive power or empirical analysis by the evaluation system, ignoring the validity of the evaluation system which is based on economic theory. The development of validity theory undergo the process from many aspects such as construct validity、content validity and criterion-related validity to construct validity. It is still a problem to build a consolidated concept of validity for the scholars until now. In spite of this, the validity test is still used in many domains in our real life. People have built some desired systems to test the validity including multitrait-multimethod and confirmatory factor analysis.The article first reviews the theory of regional competitive power and validity. The recollection of the related documents helps us to analyze in our paper. We, referring to the regional competitive power evaluation system which was built by Professor Xiao Hongye, take advantage of confirmatory factor analysis to test the validity of economic competitive power assess model. It indicates that the traditional model is meaningful in economic theory and involves most parts that are related. But the relationships among different economic variables are usually complicated, so the model did not fit the real data quite well. It is necessary for us to do some modification. Considering the meaning in economic theory, we modify the assess model by changing the variables or fit the relationships between manifest variables and latent variables, propose a new evaluation model which based on the perspective of scale and efficiency. It is proven by the test that the new model actually raise the construct validity compare with the original model.