Study On Urban Competitiveness Of Urban Agglomeration In The Middle Reaches Of The Yangtze River

As the development of economic globalization and regional Integration, connection between countries is becoming more and more closely, at the same time, the competition between them is becoming more and more intense. In most countries, in order to strengthen its own interests, the influence of cities gradually expanded to urban agglomerations, which become the country’s important economic growth pole. Therefore, the competition between countries is gradually transformed into the competition between the main cities and the urban agglomerations.As the development and make a great contribution to economic progress of the pearl river delta urban agglomeration,the Yangtze river delta urban agglomeration and Jing-jin-ji urban agglomeration,the significance of urban agglomeration in our country has been universally acknowledged.Urban agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River is growing "the fourth pole" of Chinese economic Relying on its strategic location and resource advantages, its position is becoming more and more important.However, the cities in urban agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River have obvious differences and incongruity, that bring about the lower competitiveness. So, evaluating the cities competitiveness in Urban agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River is indispensable.Domestic and foreign scholars have made thousands of cases study and empirical analysis on urban agglomeration and city competitiveness, but with urban agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River as the object of study is relatively rare.Therefore, this paper is under this background. Firstly, the paper summarized the domestic and foreign existing researches, which focus on urban agglomeration and city competitiveness. By using the SWOT analysis method, the paper analyzes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threatens in urban agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River.Secondly, referred to the domestic and foreign index system of city competitiveness, based on the development of urban agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River, this paper builds a new index system. This system contains 6 factors (city size, urban economic, urban public service and innovation, urban infrastructure, urban "two style" development) and 31 indexes. In addition, using the factor analysis method, this paper analyzes the cities competitiveness. The results show that polarization of urban competitiveness is very serious in the 26 cities of urban agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River. Competitiveness of three core cities (Wuhan, Changsha and Nanchang) is much higher than other cities; Urban Competitiveness of cities in the Middle Reaches of the YangtzeRiver is relatively poor overall. The Competitiveness of nineteen cities is below the average level. To a certain extent, that has a hinder influence on the overall development of urban agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River.Finally, by analyzing the results presented suggestions of enhancing the competitiveness of urban agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River.