CHARACTERISTICS AND DRIVING FACTORS OF REGIONAL ECONOMY COORDINATED DEVELOPMENT EFFICIENCY UNDER URBAN DIGITALIZATION: EVIDENCE FROM THE YANGTZE RIVER ECONOMIC BELT

Abstract

Regional economy coordinated development (RECD) is an important symbol of social progress and an important guarantee of social harmony, political stability and economic sustainable development. Previous studies mainly focus on the relationship between digitalization and RECD, but they fail to investigate the RECD efficiency (RECDE) driven by urban digitalization. This paper characterizes and explores the RECDE in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) from 2011 to 2019 from the perspective of urban digitalization by constructing a novel evaluation indicator system and using an EBM model. Meanwhile, this paper analyses the regional differences, temporal–spatial evolution characteristics, and the influencing factors of urban digitalization driving RECDE via the methods of spatial autocorrelation, the Gini coefficient, kernel density estimation and a geo-detector. The results indicate that: (1) the RECDE of YREB is on the rise as a whole, but the efficiency level is low. The RECDE shows a stepwise increase in the order of upper, middle and lower reaches. The RECDE also shows obvious spatial differentiation characteristics. (2) From the perspective of temporal and spatial evolution, the RECDE has changed from a dispersed state to a contiguous agglomerated state as a whole. The average RECDE of the YREB has varied significantly over the years. High-efficiency cities are relatively dispersed, while low-efficiency cities are relatively concentrated. (3) Government intervention, physical capital level and economic development level are the primary influencing factors of RECDE. These results imply that the government should attach great importance to the role of digitalization in improving the RECDE. When formulating regional coordinated development policies, the government should first formulate differentiation strategies according to the economic development level of different cities, and then give full play to the promoting role of government intervention and digital capital investment.