Science Research Management ›› 2019, Vol. 40 ›› Issue (11): 46-56.

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An evaluation and empirical analysis of urban economic and social development based on the set pair analysis

Zhang Yajing, Chi Guotai   

  1. Faculty of Management and Economics, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, Liaoning, China
  • Received:2016-10-28 Revised:2018-06-20 Online:2019-11-20 Published:2019-11-25

Abstract: The purpose of this paper: Urban economic and social development refers to the measurement of the coordination status of a region’s economy, people’s livelihood and ecology. The economic and social development of a city is not only limited to the accumulation of economic material, but also a higher level of value pursuit. It is necessary to make an accurate and comprehensive evaluation of urban economic and social development from various aspects. As the second echelon area in the urban system, China’s sub-provincial cities are mostly central cities in various places. Their economic and cultural developments have a strong leading role in surrounding cities, so sub-provincial cities are an important group. Studying and analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of economic and social development of various sub-provincial cities, it can provide comparative analysis and countermeasures for promoting economic and social development in sub-provincial cities and other regions, and assist sub-provincial cities to determine their own urban positioning and formulate development strategies.
The research method of this paper: This paper takes 15 sub-provincial cities such as Changchun and Shenzhen as the empirical samples. This paper establishes a primary selection index system for economic and social development by interviewing experts from the Development and Reform Commission, combing the economic and social development indicators of international authoritative institutions, and summarizing the high-frequency indicators of five-year planning in domestic cities. The economic and social indicator system finally constructed in this paper covers four levels of economic development, social and people’s livelihood, scientific and technological progress, and resource and environment. There are eight secondary criteria levels including economic growth, economic structure, improvement of people’s livelihood, social undertakings, investment in science and technology, scientific and technological output, and resource bearing and environmental quality. The evaluation indexes consist 36 indicators, such as proportion of tertiary industry, proportion of added value of financial industry, annual per capita net income of rural residents, and the expenditure of internal technological activities of industrial enterprises above designated size, the rate of harmless treatment of municipal solid waste, etc. Through the 36 economic and social development evaluation indicators, the comprehensive evaluation of the economic and social development of the sub-provincial cities is mainly combined with the method of set pair analysis and Spearman rank correlation test. The paper uses set pair analysis to combine coefficient of variation method, dispersion method and other evaluation methods, which solves the inconsistent problem of different single evaluation method by combined with the consistent degree of the best ranking and the opposite degree of the worst evaluation ranking. For 15 sub-provincial cities such as Changchun and Shenzhen, the four criteria levels of economy and people’s livelihood are ranked in detail, and the advantages and disadvantages of each city are observed to provide reference for policy recommendations.
There are three conclusions in this paper. First, the evaluation framework "KENDALL test - set pair analysis evaluation - Spearman rank correlation coefficient test" used in this paper solves the problem that the results obtained by different single objective evaluation methods are often very different, leading to inconsistent evaluation results. The Spearman rank correlation coefficient test method is used to test the consistency between the combined evaluation results and the single evaluation method. In some researches, the consistency test is usually lacked before and after the combination evaluation, which makes the combined evaluation results unreliable. Therefore, the proposed evaluation framework is universal and can be applied to a variety of evaluation issues, not limited to urban economic and social evaluation.
Secondly, through the empirical analysis of this paper, it is found that there are obvious regional differences in the economic and social development of sub-provincial cities in China. The rank of the economic and social development of southern regions are significantly higher than the northeast and central and western regions, and the coastal cities are ranked higher than the inland cities. For examples, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hangzhou rank in the top three in economic and social development, Shenyang and Changchun in the last two. The reason is that the northeast region started from heavy industry in the early days, nowadays, resources of in northeast region are exhausted and the output value of industry is declining. It is necessary to change the economic development mode, such as strengthening the cooperation with the Russian Far East,the cooperation of land and sea transport,which will build an important window for opening to the north to drive economic development. And through the horizontal and vertical comparison to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each city, such as social and people’s livelihood, the cities that are weak relative to their own rankings are Shenzhen, Qingdao, Chengdu, Harbin.
Thirdly, the paper finds that the importance of forest stocks, total foreign trade import and export, and R&D expenditures of industrial enterprises above designated size account for the three major indicators of industrial output value are in the top three, which are three important factors affecting urban economic and social development. Therefore, it is recommended that local governments, while developing the economy, increase the scale of foreign trade and increase expenditure on environmental protection such as forests and energy. At the same time, increase the proportion of investment in scientific and technological support such as research and development expenses, the government can adopt various funds such as guiding funds, and ways to promote the financial industry to serve the transformation of scientific and technological achievements of small and medium-sized enterprises, enhance the city’s scientific and technological competitiveness; focus on strengthening the optimization of environmental regulations, and more to the market-oriented environmental protection policy.
The research significance of this paper is twofold. First, from the theoretical significance perspective, this paper proposes a method that can solve the inconsistency of the results of different single evaluation methods. Second, from the application perspective, in this paper the economic and social comprehensive rankings of 15 sub-provincial cities are analyzed, and specific rankings are given in the four levels of economic development, social livelihood, scientific and technological progress, and resource environment. By comparing horizontal and vertical, the cities can find the advantages and disadvantages of each city’s economic and social development, and help to make a strategic plan for development.

Key words: set pair analysis, economic and society development, urban evaluation