Ecosystem of Doing Business, Total Factor Productivity and Multiple Patterns of High-quality Development of Chinese Cities: A Configurational Research based on Complex System View

Urban economic development, undoubtfully, is crucial to regional economy and quality of life, and enhancing the efficiency of urban economic development is of particular importance to boost sustainable and healthy economic and social development. Improving green total factor productivity (GTFP) is the inherent requirement for implementation of green development approach and significant achieving regional high-quality development. During recent years China has witnessed an unprecedented improvement in its business environment as measured by doing business. Therefore, for our study we selected to explore the urban sustainable development in the context of China, as this experience is of great theoretical and practical value for developing countries. We use 264 Chinese cities in the period from 2003 to 2018 as a case study to examine their GTFP for further evaluation of urban sustainable development. The spatial panel data regression results demonstrate that the scale impact of city size on urban productivity appears to have an inverted U shape. This effect will grow when the cities’ industrial structure becomes more dominated by the service sector. The suggested framework as well as the results may provide important guidance for future urban productivity improvement and sustainable city development.