As Internet access grows at different rates across regions, the Internet has had variable effects on regional economies through agglomeration and spillover effects. This paper uses province-level panel data from 2000 to 2013 to study inequality in Internet access, its spatial effect on regional economies in China and the channels through which the spillover effects are most evident. We find that the Internet has dispersed quickly from core cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, to coastal provinces; and has had increasingly significant effects on neighboring regions. However, the Internet speed is still comparatively low outside the core cities. We then use endogenous growth models to quantify the effect of Internet access on regional economies. Our results show that, while Internet dispersion is positively associated with economic growth, the spillover effect varies significantly by region and is more pronounced in developed regions. So is the effect of the science and technology environment. Developed regions have benefited the most in the process. The three channels of spillover are listed here in order of relative significance: economy, proximity and urbanization. The spillover effect of the Internet may lead to the divergence of regional economies, working against the national goal of reducing regional inequality.

This paper refines the fuzzy logic method, while constructing a theoretical model of the relationship between economic resilience, social resilience and ecological resilience, and evaluates the coupling coordination between the economic-social-ecological resilience of 197 prefecture-level cities in China’s urban agglomerations in 2019. Findings include: (1) The mean ecological resilience of China’s urban agglomerations in 2019 was the highest, followed by economic and social resilience. (2) Promoting urban agglomerations had higher resilience scores in the three dimensions, especially in the economic dimension. Growing urban agglomerations had low resilience values on the whole, especially economic resilience. (3) The mean coupling coordination degree of economic-social-ecological resilience ranged from near-incoordination to narrow balance. (4) The coupling coordination degree between the two coincided with the positioning of existing urban agglomerations. (5) Economic resilience had the most significant impact on the coupling coordination. Finally, we give differentiated countermeasures to improve the resilience of urban agglomerations. This study aims to contribute to the promotion of urban resilience research, and helps to plan and design more rational urban economic-social-ecological systems, thereby enhancing the ability of cities to cope with any uncertainties and contingencies.

In recent decades, China has been on a new journey toward a digital economy of which e-commerce accounts for a substantial proportion. Despite some controversy, the innovation diffusion hypothesis and efficiency hypothesis of online shopping have been tested in research on the urban–rural dual structure. However, research on the spatial diffusion model of online business is sparse. Based on the online business and online shopping index released by the Ali Research Institute, this article compares the spatial diffusion model of online shopping and online business in the core–periphery structure based on the inequality between the eastern and western regions of China. Our study suggests that online business trends are in line only with the innovation diffusion hypothesis, with marginal counties having lower levels of online business. Online shopping, on the other hand, is in line with the innovation diffusion hypothesis and partially with the efficiency hypothesis, with a higher index of online shopping in the core regions and some peripheral counties. The discrepancy in the spatial diffusion mode is due to the differences in aims and supporting elements between online business and online shopping. Apart from infrastructure, the diffusion of online business is largely constrained by the regional industrial base, while online shopping is influenced by income and savings levels, which is the main reason for the differences in the spatial diffusion of online business and online shopping. We argue that the diffusion of online business has not led to the ability to balance regional inequalities at the national scale, while online shopping has the potential to bridge core and peripheral disparities better than online businesses, not in terms of the ability to bridge economic disparities, but in terms of the potential to reduce spatial consumption inequalities and welfare gains.

Producer services are traditionally considered as place-bound and clustered in city centers to benefit from agglomeration effects. Such a pattern has been reshaped, however, by the decentralization of the service industry and the development of information and communication technology (ICT), especially for the software industry. This study investigates locational trajectories and underlying factors of software firms from 1990 to 2011 in Shanghai to detect intraurban location trajectories and spatial dynamics. We find that location of the software industry has changed from a monocentric pattern concentrated in the central city area toward a polycentric pattern with a relative decline of the core area. Using a conditional logit model, the study has found that government policies, accessibility, environmental conditions, agglomeration economies, and site characteristics are important determinants of location choice for software firms. In addition, the firm-level survey and in-depth interviews in Pudong Software Park show that government policy and planning, especially rent and tax incentives, have played a vital role in attracting software firms to locate in development zones.

In the context of the global information economy, ready access to the Internet is critical to a city’s competitiveness, which has prompted a number of cities to launch plans to establish wireless networks. Most literature on the development of wireless cities focuses on cities in Western countries, and few have discussed how Chinese cities have adopted wireless technologies in their urban infrastructure development efforts. This paper examines recent development and spatial distribution of public Wi-Fi access in Shanghai, a leading business hub in China. We mapped Wi-Fi hotspots through the government sponsored “i-Shanghai” project and China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC). We find that while telecommunication providers have been proactively deploying WLAN (wireless local area network，a proxy of public Wi-Fi or wireless access) hotspots in Shanghai, neither government sponsored WLAN hotspots nor facilities established by CMCC could cover the old traditional neighborhoods in the central city and sub-districts in remote rural areas. We also address the development of a more sustainable wireless city in Shanghai with a particular focus on digital divide and social equity issues.