Measurement and spatial-temporal convergence analysis of high-quality development of service industry: new city-level evidence in China

Penglong Li, Yongze Yu and Ye Xuan

Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, 2025, vol. 30, issue 2, 398-426

Abstract: This research constructs an index system to measure the level of high-quality development of service industry in Chinese cities at the prefecture-level, and uses the entropy-weighted TOPSIS method to measure it. The spatial convergence model is also used to analyze the spatial and temporal convergence of service industries in urban agglomerations, and to analyze their regional differences and spatial and temporal convergence characteristics. It is found that there are regional differences in the level of service industry development in Chinese cities, showing conditional beta convergence characteristics. Further, the convergence of high-quality development of service industry is decomposed in the dimension of five intrinsic factors of high-quality industrial development. It is concluded that the spatial-temporal convergence presented by the high-quality development of service industry mainly comes from industrial restructuring, industrial synergy development and industrial environment optimization. The results show that the institutional factors of “active government” and “efficient market” significantly contribute to the improvement of the quality development of urban services, after add the institutional factors of fiscal decentralization and marketization. And the research based on spatial spillover effects find that the convergence of service development among cities is mainly based on the “Yardstick Competition” of convergence. These results contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the level of quality development of China’s urban service industry, also provide a reference for policy formulation for coordinated regional development and the construction of a unified national market.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13547860.2023.2295741 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:rjapxx:v:30:y:2025:i:2:p:398-426

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjap20

DOI: 10.1080/13547860.2023.2295741

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy is currently edited by Leong Liew

More articles in Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().