Economic coordination development from the perspective of cross-regional urban agglomerations in China

The construction of urban agglomeration systems is of great significance for China to implement an innovation-driven strategy and promote regional coordinated development. Taking panel data of 61 counties or municipal cities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration and the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration as the research object in this paper, the gravitational model is improved to measure cross-regional economic linkages, and a threshold model is conducted to reveal the nonlinear influencing mechanism within the variable of advanced industrial structure, economic tie, and vitality of consumption on economic-coordinated development severally. Moreover, the influence mechanism model is proposed by considering the urban-group effect, and its effect is tested in the bootstrap cross-validation procedure. The empirical results show that the coordinated development of regional economy depends to a large extent on the closeness of economic linkages rather than geographic location, while the ability of economic coordination development from the aspect of cross-regional urban agglomerations has been affected by the nonlinear effects of economic tie and the vitality of consumption, and more dependent on the setting of the advanced industrial structure's level. In addition, the ability of regional economic coordinated development of the two urban agglomerations has an obvious city-group effect, while economic tie, advanced industrial structure, education level, population density, and public goods and services have a non-negligible effect.