Ni Pengfei speech at press release on Chinese urban competitiveness No.6

Ni Pengfei speech at press release on Chinese urban competitiveness No.6

Updated: 2008-09-27 16:10:02

Thanks very much to Dean Chen, GM Yao and other leaders for attending today’s seminar. Also thanks for the long time support from friends in the media. I would like to explain again before my speech that it is just a reference material for decision makers of local governments, not the standard of evaluating a city. I hope the media can give the public good guidance, and I also hope the media can inform some government departments and friends from academic field who are interested in the research from place to place. At first, I would like to give you a brief introduction about my report today. The highlights of the competitiveness report of this year are as follows.

This is a new development of basic concepts. The newest definition of urban competitiveness proposed by us is that “Urban Competitiveness is comparing with other cities, the city’s ability to sustainably attracting elements, creating products, occupying market, creating fortune, and providing benefits for residents in a greater, faster, better and more economical way. Different from the concept used in the past few years, it now emphasizes more on future and sustainability. The basis of urban competitiveness specially focuses on improving the benefits of residents, and its final target is providing benefits for urban residents. This is the latest evolution of our concept.

We have made some theoretical progresses in this field every year. We have focused on the study of “index systems” this year. I have reviewed all the index systems of urban competitiveness studies in the world. China is not the only country which is studying competitiveness on a large scale around the world, USA, Philippines, South Korea, India, EU and some international organizations are trying to do some research in this field. For example, the World Bank once had a group which created an index system of urban competitiveness, but they didn’t start targeted research. The World Economic Forum have also tried, but failed to continue the research. In this report I have reviewed the index systems of about 10 countries and organizations, you could find the features, advantages and disadvantages of our index system compared with other systems.

One highlight of this year’s quantitative research is the groups. We categorized cities into different groups. In the past, some governments were concerned that if it was appropriate to compare 200 big or small cities together. Actually we think it is appropriate to do an overall comparison, because no matter if your city is big or small, no matter what the function of the city is, the final result is to compare its ability of “creating fortune in a greater, faster, better and more economical way”. However, it is more favorable to categorize cities according to their regions, scales and development stages. We tried this strategy this time and got some excellent findings which you will see in the book.

Another highlight is the case study. We will choose 10 of the best cities every year. How do we choose them? Basically we draw on the experience from previous studies. If a city met four requirements – if it had sustainability, innovati