Provincial division of economic zones based on the improved urban gravity model: A case study of Hunan Province, China

Regional collaboration and the division of economic zones have been widely discussed for sustainable development. This paper aims at building a framework for analyzing the provincial division of economic zone (DEZ) via considering spatial interaction among regions based on the improved gravity model and clustering approaches. The proposed framework of province DEZ is applied in the case study of Hunan Province, China. The results reveal that Chenzhou city in the south of Hunan Province is always excluded from the DEZ due to its larger external gravity from other cities in neighboring provinces. It also shows that the city components of economic zones (EZs) have experienced a fluctuation at a higher degree from 2002 to 2006 to 2009 while it reached to a stable phase in 2013. Furthermore, cross-provincial regional integration and the highway construction have a significant impact on the change of city components of EZ. The findings are of great potential in regional planning that should be incorporated to the toolkit of regional policy and sustainable development for local governments.