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Keywords

specialized and sophisticated, business environment, dynamic qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), hot spot; Yangtze River Delta (YRD)

Abstract

The upgrading of small and medium-sized enterprises to ‘specialized and sophisticated’ is an important driving force for promoting regional industrial development, while the business environment is a key external environment of the market dominated by local governments, and its service enterprise agglomeration development has become a hot research topic in the field. Therefore, how to coordinate the business environment to promote the development of regional enterprises to ‘specialized and sophisticated’ is a practical problem that needs to be answered urgently. Based on list of five batches of ‘little giant’ enterprises in 41 cities in the Yangtze River Delta announced by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology from 2019 to 2023, this paper analyzes the geographical location of enterprises, and explores the geographical spatial distribution pattern of ‘little giant’ enterprises through kernel density analysis and other methods, and further uses the dynamic QCA research method in the R language environment to explore the synergistic effect of business environment factors on the number of ‘little giant’ enterprises on the time axis, revealing the core influencing factors affecting the number of ‘little giant’ enterprises in the Yangtze River Delta from 2017 to 2021 and their interactive relationship. The results show that: First, The Yangtze River Delta is the leading region in China with a dense distribution of ‘little giant’ enterprises. The spatial distribution of ‘little giant’ enterprises is like ‘scattering flowers in the sky’, with a coverage rate of 100% in 41 prefecture-level cities; in terms of ‘ hot spot’, the ‘ little giant’ enterprises in the Yangtze River Delta as a whole show a pattern of ‘one-pole and multi-core’ model, and are ‘more-east and less-west’. Second, The manufacturing industry dominates the number of ‘little giant’ enterprises, with a distribution pattern of ‘three-pole and threecore’, followed by scientific research and technology services, with a distribution pattern of ‘one-pole and multicore’. Third, A single business environment factor does not constitute a necessary condition for the high number of ‘little giant’ enterprises. Two business environment paths can drive a high number of enterprises in the manner of ‘All roads lead to Rome’ in which a strong market environment has a universal influence, including market-led coordination-driven and the market-led human environment coordination-driven models. Among them, high market environment and non-high government environment play a universal role. Fourth, In the time dimension, the explanatory power of the two configurations shows an increasing trend year by year, mainly due to the national policy support for specialized and sophisticated and the improvement of the business environment level. In the spatial dimension, the explanatory power of the two configurations does not differ significantly among prefecture-level cities, both of which are relatively high. Fifth, This paper also finds that three types of business environment ecology can lead to a non-high number of ‘little giant’ enterprises, all of which show imbalances between the market and the government. The research conclusions can help the government to provide a high-quality business environment for specialized and sophisticated enterprises while implementing precise policies, and accelerate the development of regional specialized and sophisticated enterprises. Different regions have varying capital and technological endowments, and the business environment conditions differ, the paths to develop specialized and sophisticated enterprises are also diverse. Considering the emergence of specialized and sophisticated enterprises in the Yangtze River Delta, we draw on the thinking of system integration theory to ‘string beads into a chain’ to build a special industrial chain in the Yangtze River Delta, enhance the resilience of the industrial chain, and provide policy recommendations.

DOI

10. 16315 / j. stm. 2024. 06. 003

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