Research On The Urban Competitiveness Of Shandong Province Under The Financial Crisis

In the 21st century, the economic development has been showing a trend of integration. Under the background of globalization, cities as the carriers of economy are becoming the leading roles in economy development and each city wants to catch the opportunity in the urbanization to accelerate the speed of economy development and stand itself out. Since July 2007, the U.S. Financial crisis caused by the subprime crisis has been spreading the world and then did on other countries more swiftly, which made the world economy in recession. Currently, the impact of financial crisis continues. As the carrier of regional economy, cities play an important role in the fight against financial crisis, and their competitivenesses also get affected more or less by the crisis. In this particular context, research on urban competitiveness of Shandong Province is helpful to understand the current situation and potential of each city and to keep track of their development trend after the crisis, which offers bases to develop some strategies for cities of Shandong Province and successfully deal with the financial crisis.In this paper, the urban competitiveness of Shandong Province under the background of financial crisis was studied. Some important results are got. The main contributions of this thesis are as follows :( 1) On the base of previous study results, the urban competitiveness index system in of Shandong Province was established and improved further. (2) Using factor analysis, the urban competitive situation of Shandong Province was studied and the results show that the crisis did not have much impact on the 17 cities'competitivenesses of Shandong Province.(3) With the 12 representative indicators selected from the 26 indicators and using the growth rates of those 12 indicators, the crisis'influence on the urban competitiveness of Shandong Province was studied by means of cluster analysis and the result showed that the crisis affected 5 cities: Qingdao, Yantai, Weihai, Zibo, and Dongying most seriously. (4) According to the three-year total scores of 2006, 2007 and 2008, the 17 cities were classified into three groups: competitive, strong and weak. And further analyses of 8 typical cities were performed to study their competitive advantages and disadvantages respectively. (5) Some constructive suggestionswas made to improve urban competitiveness.