Spatiotemporal Differentiation and Driving Force Analysis of the High-Quality Development of Urban Agglomerations along the Yellow River Basin

The ecological protection and high-quality development (HQD) of the Yellow River Basin (YRB) have been promoted as national strategies. An urban agglomeration is the basic unit of the YRB used to participate in international competitions. Taking seven urban agglomerations covering 70 cities along the YRB as the sample, this paper establishes a high-quality evaluation system and uses the entropy method and exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) to analyze the HQD levels of the seven urban agglomerations along the YRB from 2009 to 2018. In addition, geographically-weighted regression (GWR) is adopted to analyze the influencing factors. The results show that: (1) the gap in the HQD of the seven urban agglomerations gradually narrows, showing a spatial pattern of “high in the east, low in the west, and depression in the middle”; (2) the HQD levels of the seven urban agglomerations have a strong spatial correlation, and the patterns of cold and hot spots have not changed substantially, showing the spatial distribution of “hot in the east, cold in the west”; (3) the degree of influence of each driving factor on the HQD differs among the seven urban agglomerations. The order is as follows: industrial structure upgrading index > proportion of R&D expenditure > urbanization rate > internet penetration rate > proportion of urban construction area > proportion of days reaching the air standard. These findings show that advanced industrial structure and technology are the two core driving forces for the HQD of the urban agglomerations along the YRB.