Shanghai Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone Economic Competitiveness Warning System

Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone (hereinafter refers to as WFTZ) was approved by the State Council in 1990. It is the earliest founded and most mature Free Trade Zone in our country. After 15 years high-speed development, it has become a very important development zone in Shanghai and even the Yangtze River Delta Area. It plays an enormous push role to the development of Shanghai and its peripheral cities.However, as our country joins WTO, the policy advantages of WFTZ are being weakened day by day. And the questions accumulated in its history begin to appear before us. So, under such a background, it has some theory and realistic meaning to analyse the WFTZ's early warning system.Considering the particularity of the WFTZ, this research selected the competitive power of the WFTZ as its object of the early warning system.At the beginning of this article, it reviewed the theoretical foundation of competitive power and early warning system.Then it designed a set of index to compute the competitive power of WFTZ in the principle of systematicness, comprehensive, representativeness, fairness, comparativity, practicability, etc. All of these indexes are relative to actuality of the WFTZ. And combining with the analytical method of the factor, it computed the competitive power of WFTZ from 1993 to 2003 with these indexes. According to the scores, it divided the evolution of WFTZ into 3 stages, that are the beginning stage, the adjusting stage and the quick developing stage.After that, according to the score of competitive power, it defined the meaning of the alert, found the source of the alert, analysed the omen of the alert, and set up an early warning model of the competitive power of the WFTZ. This is the key-point of this article.Finally, it examined the accuracy of this early warning system with the competitive power score of 2004 and make prediction for 2005.The research use quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to set up the early warning system of the WFTZ's competitive power. This research used theSPSS software to do the Regression and the Factor analysis. In this article, it used the Factor analysis to compute the competitive power score from 1993 to 2003, and the Regression analysis to set up the warning model.This research is a beneficial try to the research field of the competitive power and early warning system.