Study on Spatial Imbalance and Determinants of E-Commerce Development in Zhejiang, China

Abstract

As a world-famous and well-developed e-commerce region, the development of e-commerce in Zhejiang province has always attracted people's wide attention. Based on publicly available e-commerce transaction-related data, basic geographic data, and regional economic and social development data, we use the Gini coefficient to measure the imbalance of e-commerce development in Zhejiang province during 2017-2019. With the help of spatial analyst tools in ArcGIS desktop, the cluster and outlier analysis method is used to study the spatial pattern of e-commerce development in the province at the district or county-level city scale. To explore the causes of spatial aggregation and imbalance of e-commerce in Zhejiang province quantitatively, the paper proposes a geographical weighted regression (GWR) model with 15 economic and social development-related indicators. GWR and ordinary least squares (OLS) analysis indicate that 5 of the 15 selected indicators are highly related to the development of regional e-commerce development in Zhejiang, China.