Spatiotemporal Variation and Inequality in China’s Economic Resilience across Cities and Urban Agglomerations

Haichao Yu, Yan Liu, Chengliang Liu and Fei Fan
Additional contact information
Haichao Yu: Institute of Regional and Urban-Rural Development, Wuhan University, 299 Bayi Road, Wuhan 430072, China
Yan Liu: School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072, Australia
Chengliang Liu: School of Urban and Regional Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China
Fei Fan: Institute of Regional and Urban-Rural Development, Wuhan University, 299 Bayi Road, Wuhan 430072, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 12, 1-19

Abstract: Economic resilience is a critical indicator of the sustainable development of an urban economy. This paper measures the urban economic resilience (UER) of 286 major cities in China from six indicators—economic growth, opening up, social development, environmental protection, natural conditions, and technological innovation—using a subjective and objective weighting method and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods. Furthermore, kernel density estimation (KDE) was used to reveal the spatial and temporal trends in UER across cities, and a social opportunity function was applied to access the opportunity for economic resilience and the fairness of opportunities for economic resilience in 19 urban agglomerations in China. The results show that the UER was, in general, low across all cities but increased over time. Geographically, the UER disperses from the eastern coast to inland cities. Amongst urban agglomerations in China, the economic resilience opportunity index also varies spatially and increases over time. On the other hand, the opportunity fairness index of UER remained largely stable and substantial inequalities exist across all urban agglomerations, indicating the need for differentiated policy intervention to ensure equality and the sustainable development of the region. The methodology developed in this research can also be applied in other cities and regions to test its re-applicability and to understand the UER in different contexts.

Keywords: urban economic resilience; economic resilience opportunity; inequality; urban agglomeration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/12/4754/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/12/4754/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:12:p:4754-:d:190235

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().