Abstract
The interactive development of economic globalization, informatization, marketization, and urbanization has reshaped the urban commercial landscape and society, and poses new requirements for the business environment. New commerce forms that are based on information technology and electronic payment and integrate online and offline forms are growing rapidly in China. However, the relationship between new commerce forms and the business environment has not received sufficient academic attention. Using 29 major cities in China, this paper constructs a new business index system consisting of the following six sub-indexes: the characteristic hotels index, the Starbucks index, the Freshhema index, the concept bookstores index, the smart convenience stores index, and the healthcare and medical examination index. The entropy coupled with the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method was used for quantitative evaluation of urban new business vitality. We found that the Freshhema index and smart convenient store index are the two most important evaluation factors. The relationship between the new business index and the business environment was examined through multiple linear regression (MLR) and Gaussian process regression (GPR) analysis. We found that the MLR is not a valid model, and instead, the nonlinear GPR model has good explanatory power for this relationship. The results show that human capital has a more important effect than the economic development level on business vitality. The rise and development of new commercial forms depend on the innovation and optimization of the business environment.
Highlights
Commercial space is the core area of a city’s economic flow [1,2]
In existing studies of various city indices, the urban new commercial index has not attracted enough attention. By studying this new business index, the purpose of this article is to address the following questions: (1) How can one quantitatively measure the vitality of a new commercial space? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each city in the development of new business forms? (2) What is the relationship between the vitality of a new business space and the business environment? What factors have more important effects on a city’s new commercial vitality? (3) How can one enhance the vitality of a new business space and reshape its characteristics by optimizing the business environment? The business environment is the soil for the survival and development of enterprises
We propose the following three hypotheses: (1) Hypothesis I: The new business vitality is highly correlated with the business environment factors
Summary
Commercial space is the core area of a city’s economic flow (e.g., population flow, goods flow, capital flow, technology flow, information flow) [1,2]. It is the most attractive, vibrant, and competitive area. As a highly composite area of urban activities and needs, commercial space develops and evolves through the agglomeration and diffusion of markets and market components. Urban commercial space in the modern sense is, a business circle or commercial cluster formed by a combination of attractive and impressive commercial forms. The construction of a global supply chain has formed a new urban commercial landscape and given rise to a new commercial civilization [3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
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