Empirical Study On Relationship Between Talent Environment And Talent Competitiveness Of Sub-Provincial Cities In China

A city is a regional center of political, economic and cultural exchanges,where talents are gathering and sheltering. A city can’t develop without talent’s devotion, and the growth and cultivation of talents also need the support from the cities. Superior talent environment is conducive to talent construction and enhancing the talent competitiveness of a city. The State Council set 15 subprovincial cities in 1997. Since then, they’re not only the important part of the city net, but a development leader as central cities. Competitions between regions can be largely reflected in the that between sub-provincial cities. Sub-provincial cities play an exemplary role in optimizing the talent environment and improving the talent competitiveness.This paper is to report a study on the relationship between talent environments and talent competitiveness of sub-provincial cities,where the talents were defined as the whole manpower.An index system of talent environment that conform to the needs of sub-provincial cities was proposed based on a thorough review and summary of published researches. This index system contains 5 first level indices and 18 second level indices. The talent environment scores of the sub-provincial cities in 2012 were calculated using the factor analysis. The calculated resultes shown that the talent environment of the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta were excellent, but the four northeastern cities had obvious disadvantagesThe positive correlation between talent competitiveness and talent environment was verified,with correlation analysis, where the calculated talent environment scores and those published by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences were used as inputs, confirming that optimizing talent environment helps improving the talent competitiveness of sub-provincjal cities.The gray correlation analysis was conducted to identify the the most influential environmental factors on talent competitiveness of sub-provincial cities, such as science and technology expenditure to GDP, living area per capita, proportion of education expenditure to GDP, etc. It also found that although the factor ranking of factors changed from 2006 to 2012the proportion of science and technology expenditure to GDP, proportion of education expenditure to GDP, proportion of tertiary industry to GDP were almst always within the top 5 factors.All foundings in this study suggest that efforts to improve talent environments woud raise talent competitiveness, and sub-provincial cities should put their great efforts on the key factors to optimize talent environments.