Research On Comprehensive Evaluation Of Border Counties’ Development In Inner Mongolia

Geopolitics and geo-economics are important means for countries to fight for and safeguard their interests on the world stage.As a special form of political and geographical mutual participation,the border is a key area for countries to build geo-economic and geo-political links.Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is located in the core hub of the China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor and is an important gateway for Chinese “Belt and Road” to the west and north.The border is dominated by counties which the main production and lifestyle are animal husbandry with fragile ecological environment,and the economic development lags mostly for poor counties.In the context of the national strategy,border counties in Inner Mongolia have become an important position for economic and trade exchanges between China and Eurasian countries.there are both opportunities and challenges,as well as poverty and backwardness,and development is highly complex.Carrying out comprehensive evaluation and research on the development status of border counties in Inner Mongolia and dividing the types to provide reference suggestions for future development are of great significance for maintaining peace and stability in border areas.The article builds a comprehensive evaluation index system for the development of border counties in Inner Mongolia based on the geography theory of human-land relationship and geo-economics,using the combination of entropy method and AHP to calculate the weight of each subsystem,basing on the collection of spatial data and socio-economic statistics from 2002 to 2017,analyzing the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of various subsystems and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of counties development,and the cluster analysis method is used to classify the types of counties and put forward development suggestions.The main research conclusions are as follows:(1)From the perspective of spatial distribution characteristics,there is a significant horizontal zonal distribution law in the natural environment of the border counties,showing a gradual decreasing trend from northeast to southwest;The tourism resources trend is northeast-southwest with obvious polarization and dispersion;the level of competitiveness has improved,and the level of competitiveness in northeast and west counties is relatively high;the level of social construction has improved in terms of space,the higher-level border counties are mostly concentrated in counties with complete infrastructure and ports or close to ports;the policy support of border counties is in constant dynamic adjustment,and most of the counties are strongly supported by national policies;Generally speaking,the economic development level of the border counties differs significantly,and the economic development level of the border counties with ports is relatively high.(2)From the perspective of the law of temporal changes,the natural environmental quality is mainly affected by the changes in vegetation coverage over the past 15 years with little inter-annual changes;the competitiveness of tourism resources shows a downward trend with time;the social construction level of most border counties is on the rise,but the development level of some counties in the northeast is decreasing;the policy support system of border flag counties has gradually improved;in terms of economic development,the inter-annual changes in the economic development level of 19 border counties in Inner Mongolia are more obvious.(3)From the comprehensive evaluation of the development of border counties,the comprehensive development level of various flag counties has increased to varying degrees over time and the development difference has gradually narrowed.The value of each subsystem has developed in fluctuations,the subsystem that contributes the most to the comprehensive evaluation value is the economic development of 0.2545;the area with the highest comprehensive development level developed from Manchuria in 2002 to Manchuria and Erenhot in 2017,Manchuria and Erenhot occupy an important position in the border area;although the environmental conditions in northeast counties are good,the overall development level is poor,and the absolute advantage of comprehensive development is gradually declining.The social construction in central and western counties is more difficult and the development is slower;the dominant counties are scattered in space.(4)Border counties can be divided into five types: animal husbandry type,industrial and mining type,border port type,tourism type,and forestry type.Border port counties have developed better,and have developed faster than other types of border counties.