Discrete degree on village settlement's spatial distribution and its correlation with net income of rural residents in poverty county

Abstract

A reasonable rural settlement's layout for administrative villages contributes not only to education poverty and health povertyalleviation, but also to help the government make scientific decisions for rural infrastructure construction. However, at present there exist some problems on village settlement distribution, especially in the poverty-stricken counties, such as the large amount but the small scale, unordered and scattered settlement layout, the imperfect infrastructure and so on. In the previous research, almost all the calculation principles on the rural resident's space distribution were based on the Euclidean distance, however, the Euclidean distance can not reflect the influence of topography on the residential spatial distribution pattern,while the road is the main way to connect the settlements, and the road length among the settlements is the true reflection of distance. At present, there are some blanks on taking the road network connectivity distance as a measurement to evaluate the village settlement's spatial dispersion in poverty-stricken areas, and as well as on the correlation with economic development. So taking Neixiang county as a study area, which is one of state-level poverty-stricken counties from the Qinling-Da mountains in China, this paper focuses on the specific distribution of rural residential areas and its correlation with the net income of rural residents. Based on the road network connectivity and dispersion composite index(DCI), this paper builds a discrete degree evaluation model, consisting of three inner indicators and three outer ones, and then uses GIS network analysis, overlay analysis and statistical analysis to evaluate the discrete degree of residential space distribution on 288 administrative villages from Neixiang county. Furthermore, respectively at the county scale, different geomorphic scales and different economic circles scales, the correlation analysis between the DCI and the net income of rural residents which reflects the economic development level of village, is done to reveal the relevant relationship between economic development and spatial distribution for village settlements. Results indicate that: as the dispersion degree of village residents' spatial distribution is concerned, there exists an aggregated-discrete distribution from town center to peripheral area, and specially, there is the smallest DCI value around Chengguan town, and the highest DCI values near the north,northwest and southwest mountains of the county; DCI reduces not only with the increase of net income of rural residents, but also with the influence of the DCI values of the surrounding villages; in the mountain conditions, the negative correlation between DCI and net income of rural residents is obviously stronger than that in the hilly and plain areas; the radiation effect of economic circle has great influences on both DCI and the net income of rural residents. The above conclusion has an important significance for the government's regulation planning of rural residents in poor areas, specially, when the governments plan rural residents for poverty alleviation in poor areas they have to deal with the problems systematically, so that they can improve the economic development levels of rural residents by adding economic centers, while reducing the discrete degrees of the resident settlements.