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Entrepreneurship in China’s peripheral regions

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Abstract

Entrepreneurship has risen to a national development strategy to drive China’s economic transition. Previous regional studies of Chinese entrepreneurship have focused mostly on metropolitan areas or cities. This research contributes to the literature by understanding entrepreneurship in Chinese peripheral regions and meanwhile considering sectoral variations. Based on records of 9.26 million newly registered enterprises, we present the spatial–temporal dynamics of startup activities in China’s peripheral counties from 2004 to 2016. We further conduct panel regressions to explore the geographically bounded influencing factors of total and sectoral entrepreneurship in these peripheral regions. We provide evidence on the positive impacts of macro-economic conditions, industry specialization, county size, and patent knowledge on general entrepreneurship. These findings to some extent vary by sector. We also find positive spillover effects from the nearby large metropolitan center on peripheral entrepreneurship. These findings shed light on the characteristics of sectoral entrepreneurial ecosystems and entrepreneurship policy in peripheral regions.

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Notes

  1. Authors’ own calculation based on data from China Statistical Yearbooks (County-level) and China City Statistical Yearbooks.

  2. Calculated by authors based on data from China Statistical Yearbook (County-Level) and China City Statistical Yearbook from 2004 to 2016.

  3. The geo-coded administrative boundary came from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (http://www.resdc.cn).

  4. High correlations among explanatory variables may cause multicollinearity. We conduct variance inflation factor (VIF) tests for each pooled OLS regressions. The highest VIF value is 6.14, which is less than the suggested threshold of 10 in the literature (Alin 2010; Nerlove 1963). This indicates that there is no serious multicollinearity in these regressions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shijiazhuang Tiedao University, Shijiazhuang, China

    Fenjie Long

  2. Hang Lung Center for Real Estate and Department of Construction Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Fenjie Long & Longfei Zheng

  3. School of Planning and Public Affairs, University of Iowa, 338 Jessup Hall, Iowa City, IA, 52242, USA

    Haifeng Qian

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  1. Fenjie Long
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  2. Longfei Zheng
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  3. Haifeng Qian
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Correspondence to Haifeng Qian.

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Fengjie Long acknowledges the research support by the Chinese National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences (#20BJY178) and the Department of Education of Hebei Province, China (#ZD202002). Haifeng Qian dedicates his work in this research to the memory of Roger Stough, who was a mentor, role model, and friend.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4, 5 and 6.

Table 4 Correlation table
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Table 5 Influencing factors of entrepreneurship with variables in relative measures
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Table 6 Temporal and spatial heterogeneities of influencing factors
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Long, F., Zheng, L. & Qian, H. Entrepreneurship in China’s peripheral regions. Ann Reg Sci 70, 287–313 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-022-01122-0

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