Regional Economic Development

Beijing, the capital of modern China, has been one of the fastest-developing large cities since recent decades. Nowadays its economic activities play an important role not only in local market but also in international competition. As a result of this situation, there has been considerable research focused on the economy of Beijing. However, in the current context that the relative position of Primary Industry which includes the Agriculture, Forestry, Animal Husbandry and Fishery industries, has been weakened and the service-based economy has gradually became the leading economy, little research has been conducted from the perspective of quantitative research, and instead many researchers have chosen to analyze the city from a qualitative view. Contrary to most researchers’ studies, this paper will investigate the evolvement of Beijing’s economic structure from a new starting point. In specific, we first conduct the Economic Base Study to determine the industrial structure of Beijing through calculating the related Location Quotient results in 2007. This technique helps us to identify which industries contribute most to the growth of local economy. The second analysis we used is the Shift-Share Analysis, which strengthens the conclusions of the economic base study via comparing the regional growth to national level during certain time period (for this case, we take the year 2003 and 2007 into consideration). The research findings of our study conclude that Beijing is a rapidly growing city primarily dependent upon the Tertiary Industry to advance and maintain its economic standing in China. At the final part of this thesis, we also recommend several policy advices for further development of local economy.