Organized globally and led by trans-national enterprises, global production networks (GPNs) develop rapidly along with the advancement of technology and deepening of trade liberalization. GPN provides great opportunities for developing countries to blend in global economy and realize their technological advance, as well as value chain upgrading. Facing the pressure of shifting model of economic development, China has urgent need of optimizing export trade though she has experienced marvelous success especially on export trade during the past few decades, so that the study on export product upgrading can be particularly important. Based on such consideration, this article focuses on how participating GPN influences China's export product upgrade. This article uses the conception of quality to quantitively describe product upgrade, and we calculate the product quality based on data of customs trade database from 2000 to 2011. The result shows that export product quality presents a declining trend from east to west of China, and the average quality of the whole country fluctuates a lot during 2000-2011 with a slight rising trend showing up recently. We then build several econometric models to examine whether participating in GPN matters, and how exactly this influence works. The results show that participating in GPN has remarkable influence on export product upgrading especially in eastern China, but market dispersion does not help in product upgrading. We also find that R&D investment cannot promote regional position in global value chain in eastern China, forming a typical "Low-end lock-in". Capital- and technology-intensive products benefit a lot from participating in GPN while labour-intensive exports may open markets with low-quality products. Fiscal decentralization is a key determinant in eastern and central provinces, and local governments tend to give more support to technology-intensive product upgrading.
There is significant spatial stratified heterogeneity in the operating conditions of property insurance industry in China. What is more, China's property insurers have carried out a rapid geographic expansion in recent years, then, how does the geographic expansion affect the profit of property insurers? On the basis of the panel data of China's 64 property insurers during the period from 2006 to 2015, this paper estimates the the profit efficiency for each property insurer using the geographically-weighted method. Moreover, through the regression analysis with five geographical expansion measures, we draw the following conclusions. (1) Geographical expansion is significantly and positively related to the profitability and more than 60% of the positive correlation attribute to the larger possibilities of higher profitability insurers to carry out geographical expansion. (2) Geographical expansion also plays a positive role in property insurers' profitability to some extent. Other things being equal, the number of the provincial-level regions where an insurer operates increases by 10, the premium income share from the provincial-level regions other than its headquarters-located region increases by 10 percentage points, the concentration ratio of the premium income across provincial-level regions decreases by a unit of standard deviation, and the average distance between the headquarters and its branches increases by 1%, the profitability of the property insurer will increase by 2%, 1%, 2% and 1% of a unit of standard deviation in the sample, respectively. (3) It is difficult to reach a conclusion on the positive impact of geographical expansion on profitabilitywhen the profit efficiency is estimated by ordinary methods.
Foreign direct investment in the knowledge-intensive manufacturing industry constitutes the key to industrial upgrading and economic restructuring in China. Present studies on foreign direct investment are still limited in regard to understanding their specific investment behaviors. Entry mode is the key strategy of foreign firms which determines their success in the host countries. Regions, as the basic spatial units with specific economic, social and cultural character, affect the entry mode of foreign firms to a great extent. This paper aims to reveal the geographical mechanism of the entry mode of FDI in the knowledge-intensive manufacturing sector, which advances the understanding of the exogenous-driven mechanism of urban and regional development within the context of economic restructuring in China nowadays. The theoretical framework of this paper proposes two fundamental locational factors influencing the choice of entry mode into the Chinese market: regional institutional environment and regional absorptive capacity. On the one hand, regional institutional environment is expected to influence the transaction cost of doing business in the host countries, in particular within the context of transition economies. When the regional institutional environment is better off, the knowledge-intensive firms tend to choose the wholly-owned entry mode to safeguard the interests of their own technology and reduce the risks of being rapidly imitated by local actors without costs. On the other hand, regional absorptive capacity enhances the willingness of foreign firms to form joint ventures with local firms in order to tap into the local knowledge pool. In regions with low absorptive capacity, foreign investment tends to constrain the scope of knowledge exchange within communities of foreign firms, and show limited willingness to cooperate and interact with local firms. Using the database of German knowledge-intensive FDI in China from 1982 to 2014, the analysis shows that the German FDI has been concentrated in the coastal areas of China. Spatio-temporal statistical analysis demonstrates that the location of German FDI has been spreading from coastal to inland provinces. In coastal provinces, it has been spreading from the central to the peripherial cities. Since 1995, the entry mode of German knowledge-intensive FDI has been shifting from joint ventures to wholly-owned mode. The logit model results further show that the entry mode of German FDI in knowledge-intensive sector is driven by multiple locational factors. On one hand, the decision of FDI firms to take joint ventures as the entry mode in the host country is influenced by the level of urban human capital and the degrees of industrial specialization. This implies that regional knowledge absorptive capacity is essential to the formation of local-global strategic coupling. On the other hand, the FDI stock and the number of authorized patents in the city significantly encourage the entry mode decision of a wholly-owned FDI firm, because the knowledge-intensive firms’ core competence lies in technology. These firms are most concerned about the issues on intellectual right protection. As a result, the regional institutional environment is an important locational determinant for the knowledge-intensive FDI firms.
Based on the OFDI data of 4616 Chinese companies in America during the period of 2004-2014, the paper analyzed the characteristics of industrial structures and geographical distributions, as well as their changing trends. Then it built an OFDI location decision model combined with the attributive characters of host country and relationship characters of host country-home country. Finally it quantitatively recognized the country determinant and the discrepancy among different industries. The research found the following conclusions. Firstly, the geographic distribution of China's OFDI in America was highly concentrated, with service industry as the main industry. State-owned enterprises were the main investors of OFDI and private companies were not so active in terms of investment. As time went on, the OFDI distribution in different countries tended to be discrete, with an uptrend of manufacture industry and a downtrend of service industry. Besides, the proportion of private companies involved was increasing. Secondly, the main body of China's OFDI in America was domestic manufacturers, and their investment was highly concentrated on the industries of wholesale & retail, commercial service, import & export trading, etc. The above facts indicated their participation in building international value-added chain and globalization, and verified their gradual and continuous course of international expansion. Unlike the extension of manufacturers to service industry, import & export trading companies and commercial service companies mainly focused on further development of their original main business advantage. Thirdly, the introduction of relational variables effectively promoted the depth of the explanation on OFDI country difference. Export had prominently promoted OFDI, which accorded with the performance of complementary model, and showed that China's OFDI in America was still in the initial stage of understanding overseas markets. At the initial stage, good and close political and social relationships could effectively promote OFDI, and private companies were playing a less important role than state-owned companies. Fourthly, the market seeking motivation was the most obvious motivation for China's OFDI in America, while energy access motivation, technology acquisition motivation and production cost reducing motivation were not fully confirmed by the model. Fifthly, unlike wholesale and retail industries, commercial service industry and manufacturing industry which commonly pursued market scale, the industry of geological exploration and development industries, focused more on resources searching, which determined good political relationships and the special importances of state-owned enterprises.
Evolutionary economic geography and institutional economic geography, which emerged in the late 1990s, provides the important perspective to the dynamics and spatial process of industry agglomeration. Based on the evolutionary economic geography and institutional economic geography, an analytical framework, including window of locational opportunity, financial enterprise/institution spinoff, regional branching and institutional thickness, has been proposed, and a particular perspective with respect to the key problem in economic geography of how to explain the rise and dynamics of financial industry agglomeration in inland regional central city has been explained. Accroding to financial statistics during the period 2003-2014, the relative questionnaires and qualitative interviews were conducted in Zhengdong New District. The findings can be summarized as follows: The establishment of Zhengdong New District has opened the window of locational opportunity for the financial industry in its formation stage; the spinoff of financial institution has played an important endogenous dynamic part in financial industry agglomeration in its fast development stage; regional branching laid a solid foundation for the innovation of financial formats and high-end elements agglomeration in the promotion stage; in the entire process of financial industry agglomeration, the continuous improvement of government support and institutional arrangements strengthened the institutional thickness, and the self-reinforcing mechanism made the stickiness of the institutional space continuously improving. However, some differences were found between financial industry and manufacturing industry, the agglomeration of financial industry was lack of the technology-related firms derived from university laboratory, academic institutions and existing industry, which had a stronger dependence on the stickiness of institutional thickness.
Along with the development of facility agriculture, horticultural agriculture and leisure agriculture, nowadays, the functions of agricultural production in rural areas have been weakened but the functions of consumption have been increased in Beijing. This shows that the commodification of rural space in Beijing has been developed in recent years. Rural tourism, as one of the important forms of the commodification of rural space, has played an important role in increasing farmers' income, preventing rural decline and revitalizing rural economy. Therefore, this paper selects rural tourism as the representative of the commodification to examine the formation and evolution of spatial commodification of rural space in Mayufang village as well as to explore farmers' participation in this process based on the actor network theory. In the process of the transformation, the rural areas being the farmers' producing and living spaces have changed to the urban residents' leisure and consumption spaces in Mayufang village and formed a heterogeneous actor-network, in which Tourism Bureau of Changping District and Changling Travel Company and other human actors and non-human actors have played a focal role. Major actors used the policy and the financial support to enroll farmers and other actors by the top-down executive network. Along with development of promotion, training, supervision and infrastructure, some local farmers started to create the physical and non-physical environments for the urban residents' consumption activities. Thus more and more farmers have been engaged in rural tourism, and the commodification of rural spaces in Mayufang village has been developed. As Mayufang village became the consumption space to the urban residents, the commodification of rural space in Mayufang village started its transformation of actor network. However, with the quit of non-human actors, which is Duijiuyu Natural Beauty and reduction of incentives launched by the original major actors, the representative of market has become the focal actor in the new actor network. More and more farmers, who were against the common purpose of the actor network were excluded, quitted the former actor network, thus commodification in rural space in Mayufang village declined. In the process of the formation of commodification of rural space in Mayufang village, the farmers who had the advantages of location, age and profession have much stronger desire to be involved in rural tourism, unemployed farmers prefer to be involved in rural tourism than farmers who make a living on agriculture. The farmers who worked in township enterprises are more willing to participate in rural tourism than self-employed business persons; villagers employed in the government units have less possibility to take part in rural tourism. While commodification of rural space in Mayufang village has declined, farmers began to transfer the labor force to other professions from rural tourism. When interests of major actors are commonly and inextricably linked with actors in actor network in rural areas, its commodification in rural space is strengthened, and vice versa.
There is a debate on whether spatially-neutral or spatially-targeted policy is a better strategy for the future development of economic geography and the spatial pattern of urbanization at the national scale. Economists emphasize the spatially-neutral policy and advocate for the free flow of production factors to the developed regions in southeast China, while economic geographers support the latter and the development of central and western China. We argue that the radiation radius of an economic hub is not limitless because of geography, more precisely, it is distance that plays an important role in the distribution of production activities and urbanization. We also believe that not only should economic benefits be taken into account, but also other factors such as politics, ethnic minority and national security. The core point of this paper is that the scale of a nation is the key determinant of the spatial layout of economic geography and urbanization, and larger countries should follow a relatively balanced development path. Based on both cross-sectional and fixed-effect panel models, we explore the relationship between the scale of a nation and city size distribution, the proxy for the spatial pattern of national economic geography. The results show that, (1) all else being equal, the scale of a nation, represented by either population or land area, is positively associated with a balanced city size distribution. That is, the economic geography in large countries is inclined to a spatially balanced layout; (2) a nonlinear relationship is identified between the spatial pattern of national economic geography and per capita GDP. That is, national spatial pattern is unbalanced at lower levels of economic development and evens out at higher levels of development; (3) urbanization, industrialization, and a stable political environment also help balance the national economic geography layout. This study's policy implication is that large countries such as China should implement the strategy of a relatively balanced development of economic geography and urbanization. Considering the objectives of national security, social stability, and the fact that China has a large population and a vast territory, it is reasonable for China to promote the development of the central and western regions with spatially-targeted policies.
Different urban elements may exhibit various aggregation patterns. It is of great significance to quantitatively investigate the disparity and connection among various aggregation patterns of urban elements for understanding the mechanism of urban development and supporting urban planning. Taking Wuhan city, Central China, as a case, we collected five types of urban elements, namely, impervious surface, population density, Point of Interest (POI), plot ratio, and road network, to explore their spatial distribution and characteristics of aggregation patterns. We first used Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) method to identify city centers and we found that there is one major center and seven sub-centers in Wuhan. Then we partitioned the study area by gradient analysis, and calculated the densities of urban elements. The density of urban element decreases outward from the centers, which is fitted well using "Inverse S-shaped" function. We used Concentration Degree Index (CDI) to reflect the aggregation degree of urban elements. The results indicate that the degrees of the aggregation of urban elements are: Commercial POI > population > plot ratio > road. Commercial POI and population are highly aggregated in the urban core area, while plot ratio and road are moderately aggregated in the urban core area. The spatial patterns of highly aggregated commercial POI and population are the combination of point pattern and zonal pattern, while the spatial patterns of moderately aggregated road network and plot ratio are the combination of point pattern, ring pattern and axial pattern. As for the lowly aggregated impervious surface, it shows a ring pattern. The attraction effect of city centers and vertical development promote the center-oriented agglomeration of urban elements. At the same time, the transportation lines and corridor effects of the scarce landscape resources reshape the spatial distribution pattern of urban elements.
The relationship between car travel and built environment is one of the hot issues in the urban studies. The existing researches mainly focus on the respective effects on car travel of individual demographic variables and built environment variables on car travel. Under the background of China's urban transformation and the social space differentiation, a growing number of scholars have examined the relationship between residents' demographics and their residential built environment. Quantifying the relative roles of the individual social attributes and the built environment in influencing car travel has a policy implication. This study applied a multilevel logit model which contains individual-level variables and neighbourhood-level variables to explore the impact on car use. It is concluded that urban residents' working-day car travel is influenced by multilevel variables associated to neighbourhood types. Most of the variation in the travel mode choice is caused by the difference among neighbourhoods. Travel mode choices have a strong neighbourhood contextual effect on car travel. As for the individual level, lower income and education level, collective unit profession, less minors in a family may help refrain the choice of automobile travel. As for the community level, improving bus stops density, building density, land mixing degree and commercial accessibility may help reduce car use ratio of working-day activities' travel. The mechanism of the relationship between two kinds of variables lies in the strength of market effect on urban residential space reconstruction. The residents who have similar social and economic attributes tend to choose the same type of neighbourhood, which has a similar built environment. These conclusions help us to have a better understanding of the mechanism behind the urban residents' working-day car travel and provide suggestions to alleviate the traffic problem by adjusting the multilevel variables in the similar type of community.
Spatial configuration of urban emergency shelters is one of the hotspot issues in disaster prevention and urban emergency management. The purpose of this study is to conduct spatial configuration of urban shelters which can help urban residents have access to the emergency shelters as soon as possible with less congestion. The spatial configuration model is built on the basis of the agent-based model and multi-criteria decision-making method. Remote sensing image data, high-precision population data, road network data and expert knowledge are integrated in the model. Three types of agents involved in emergency evacuation are designed, which include the government agent, shelter agents and resident agents, to conduct evacuation simulation. A government agent can delimitate the service areas of shelters in accordance with the administrative boundaries and road distances between the positions of residents and the locations of the shelters. Shelter agents can select specified land uses as potentially available shelters for different disasters, generate the service areas of shelters, record the information of the residents in their service areas and do relative statistical work of evacuation processes. Resident agents have a series of attributes, such as ages, positions, and walking speeds. They also have several behaviors, such as reducing speed when walking in the crowd, and helping old people and children. Integrating these three types of agents which are correlated with each other, we can simulate evacuation procedures. The simulation results are utilized to support location-allocation and configuration of emergency shelters. The location-allocation method of this study is based on multi-criteria decision making and weight sensitivity analysis, so that the locations of new shelters can be selected in highly-suitable regions for location-allocation. When the new shelters are allocated, a new round of emergency evacuation simulation will be executed to realize loop optimization of location-allocation based on the new spatial distribution of shelters to generate the final spatial configuration plan. A case study in Jing'an District, Shanghai, China, was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the model. The simulation results convinced that the new model can provide detailed planning for spatial configuration of urban shelters, which can help the residents evacuate to nearby shelters as quickly as possible with less congestion risks. The model provides a new methodology to conduct high-quality location-allocation of urban emergency shelters. It can also be extended to conduct similar spatial configuration work in other urban regions for different kinds of emergency shelters.
Spatial optimization is an important research area in geography. Most research on spatial optimization of education resource in this field is concerned with spatial efficiency, while the public is more concerned with spatial equity. In recent years, random allocation has been tested in some places, but the optimization models on the random allocation of schools have not been well formulated and developed. In China, to improve the spatial equity of education, a newly proposed reform tries to use lottery for school admission, namely "allocating several schools to one school district". However, there is little literature on how to implement the new school allocation, its impacts on school distance and educational equity. This paper constructs a quadratic programming model to minimize the variance of all students' expected values on educational quality under constraints of the maximum distance and schools' capacities. Then, Shijingshan District in Beijing is taken as a case area. The result indicates that the new allocation model can significantly improve the spatial equity of educational resources compared with the way of allocating students to the nearby school. The variance of the former decreases by 99%. Over 2/3 of the communities benefit from our model of maximum spatial equality, whose expected values of educational quality will increase. The ratio of benefit students is also about 2/3. On the other hand, the distance cost of school commuting is also significant. The average school distance increases by 3.99 times. However, it is still less than 5 km, which is commonly set as maximum distance to school. Moreover, it is also less than the survey school distance in the study area. When the parameter of the maximum distance in the model increases from 5 km to 8 km, the improvement of the variance of expected value of educational quality obeys the law of exponential growth, and the average distance increase obeys the law of arithmetic growth. When it is set at 7 km, the variance of expected value of educational quality approaches zero. It can be regarded as a state of absolute equal opportunity for every student which is usually thought to be hard or impossible to realize. Based on the results, the policy implication for China's school admission system is discussed.
On the basis of collecting and sorting related statistical yearbook data and actual survey data of 26 years during 1990-2015, 26 indicators are selected. Guided by the economic geography and communication geography and with the axis of the regional population, economic deveoplment and urbanization trend, the prediction is made for passengers, goods and traffic flow of the Bohai Strait Cross-sea Channel (hereafter referred to as "BSCC") for the future. The prediction covers province, nation and world (international trade) involved and gives high, middle and low solution respectively. Seven characteristic years are set due to a long predicting time (2017-2050). With the technology platform of EXCEL 2013, SPSS 22.0, ArcGIS 10.2, MATLABR2011b, etc., the prediction is made by organic combination of multiple methods, such as the time series curve estimation method, building passenger, goods and traffic flow exponential model, building GRNN model, traffic accessibility research method, etc., based on which the following analysis is made: (1) passengers, goods and traffic flow of the BSCC during 2020-2050 and its development trend; (2) passengers, goods and traffic flow structure of the BSCC during 2020-2050 and its development trend; (3) transportation capacity of both passengers and goods of the BSCC during 2020-2050; (4) feasibility and infeasibility of the BSCC construction; (5) future economic benefit of the BSCC construction. The prediction result shows that "catastrophic losses resulting from the extraordinarily large-scale project" will occur if the BSCC is to be built before 2050. In that case, it will also have devastating effects on sea transportation of the BSCC and cause huge losses. There is no need to build BSCC before 2040. Whether we build it in 2050 or not depends on actual social and economic development conditions before and after 2050.
As traffic flow reflects the socio-economic relations between cities, it is widely applied as a key factor in studies on city networks. Based on the inter-city railway and air passenger flow in 2010, this article made a comparison of the spatial structure and passenger flow organization of inter-city networks from the perspective of railway and air passenger flow, in terms of node, linkage, and community. The results are as follows: (1) Both city networks based on railway and air passenger flow present a hierarchical structure with Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou being the top three, while the nodes in the lower classes of two networks are different. (2) The spatial structure of linkages between cities based on railway passenger flow displays strong neighborhood effect. In contrast, the cities' own characteristics play a dominant role in the organization of air passenger flow. (3) Most of the dominant railway passenger flow is directed to the capital city in each province, forming several disperse regional systems separated by the provincial boundaries. In terms of air passenger flow, the regional systems are integrated by vertical linkages between them. (4) Although the community structure is not obvious from the perspective of air passenger flow, there are seven communities of significant geographical characteristics being detected in the railway network. The main differences between two networks are attributed to the management systems and technical characteristics of the modes of transportation.
Containerization, which is an important technical innovation in global freight system, has a profound and lasting impact on global trade, regional development, and freight spatial organization. At present, container transportation has become an important carrier of global production factors and commodity flows. Thus, research on the organization network of container transportation has attracted considerable attention from researchers. Literature relevant to this area also continues to grow. In this study, we selected 112 typical container shipping lines and freight forwarders, which are the main organizers of the inter-regional flows of container cargo around the world in the context of market economy. A total of 119 cities, where these shipping lines and freight forwarders are located, are taken as study objects. The hierarchical structure, spatial pattern, network connection, and complexity features of China's container transportation organization network are analyzed based on the theory and research method concerning urban network and complex network. Our study revealed that: (1) Gaps exist in the organizational ability of container transportation in each node-city in China's organization network for container transportation. This network can be divided into four types, namely, national hub city, regional hub city, sub-regional hub city, and local hub city. This network is characterised by a typical pyramidal hierarchical structure. (2) The spatial distribution of the organizational ability of container transportation in China is significantly imbalanced. Significant zonal differences and agglomeration can be observed in the Bohai Rim, the Yangtze River Delta, the south-eastern coastal areas, and the Pearl River Delta. In terms of spatial distribution, the "6+7" spatial structure system, which is composed of six core areas and seven agglomeration areas of the organizational ability, presents the current structure of organization network of container transportation. (3) The linkages between the national hub cities and the regional hub cities are close and extensive, which constitutes the basic framework of linkages network and the main direction of linkages among node-cities. The density of the network linkages in the eastern region is significantly higher than that of the central and western regions. By contrast, network linkages generally tend to expand from the eastern coast area to the central and western regions and from the national hub cities to the local hub cities. (4) The results of complex network analysis show that China's container transportation organization network has strong spatial concentration, connectivity, and spatial organization efficiency. Furthermore, we found that a significant correlation exists between the complexity of the network structure and the container transportation organizational ability of a node city.
