Construct Validity Research On China’s Urban Competitiveness

Along with the development of the economic globalization and the growth of regional economy in our country, the cities play an increasingly important role in the country’s economic development. The expression of regional competitiveness depends on the competition between cities more and more. Whether urban competitiveness is strong or not has become the decisive factor of regional economic development. In this background, the research on urban competitiveness in our country has been developed vigorously, and constantly been deepened and extended. Different researchers put forward their own definition of urban competitiveness according to their own command of the urban competitiveness theory, and on the basis of it evaluation model and index system are established. However, as a kind of research method of economic statistics, comprehensive evaluation must study the validity of measurement results like other statistical methods. But, the current city competitiveness evaluation research rarely check the validity of the evaluation results, which is worthy of attention and improvement. To this end, this paper will carry out this work.Firstly, the conception, theory and the evaluation research of urban competitiveness are investigated and reviewed in this paper. Secondly, theoretical development and test method of construct validity are reviewed. On the basis of the theory of construct validity, the paper set up a representative city competitiveness evaluation index system of our country from four aspects-wealth creation, concentration of resources, area radiation and sustainable development. After that, based on the theory of construct validity, the construct validity of this index system is checked with the method of Confirmatory Factor Analysis. According to the problems exposed in inspection to modify the original model, finally the paper obtained the urban competitiveness evaluation model that is full of the economic significance and construct validity.The paper not only suppose the idea of testing the validity of the urban competitiveness evaluation’s construct,which deepens the research in this field, but also has built a research framework to test it which is concrete and operable.The new evaluation model has definitly referential meaning to the evaluation of our country’s urban competitiveness.