Study On The Operating Efficiency And Evaluation Of Eastern China’s Economic Development Zones

After30years of construction and development, the economic developmentzones have made outstanding contributions to China’s economic and socialdevelopment. In the eastern part of China, economic development zones, especiallythe national development zones which usually set up earlier and developed better,accumulated relatively more experience during recent decades. These economicdevelopment zones have contributed a lot to the promotion of regional economy,acceleration of industrial concentration, the opening-up to the outside world, theattraction of foreign investment and the encouragement of innovations.In recent years, however, affected by the strengthening of economic globalization,the gradually disappearance of China’s demographic dividend and the appreciation ofRMB, a new round of internationaldivisionof labor weakened the development zones’growth and attraction of foreign investment. The previously existed problems, such asindustry homogenization, vicious competition, inefficient ma nagement, graduallyrevealed. During the new stage of social development, the efficiency improvement ofdevelopment zones is not only an important point to meet the requirements of thescientific outlook on development, but also a promotion of the new round regionaleconomic increase.Taking the national economic development zones as typical examples, this thesisanalyzed the zones’ efficiencies and their influence factors. After a description of thecharacteristics of development zones, firstly this paper used the SBM model andMalmquist index to estimate the32national development zones’ operatingefficiencies from2001to2011. Then the paper used VAR model to build a dynamicsystem and analyzed the effects of different economic and social fac tors on theefficiency index. Finally, after clustering the national development zones studied ineastern China by their indicators, the paper proposed suggestions for the futuredevelopment of the economic zones.