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.