ECONOMY AND MANAGEMENT
Shi Yanwen, Guo Tongtong, Cheng Zhitao
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,the Chinese government has implemented a series of reform measures to advance a new type of urbanization,accelerating urbanization with county towns as key carriers.Based on sample da-ta from 103 counties in Henan Province,this paper employed the entropy weight method,linear weighting method,spatial autocorrelation analysis,and geographically weighted regression(GWR)to reveal the spatio-temporal evolution of county-level urban development support capacity in 2015,2020,and 2023.The results indicated that:(1)From 2015 to 2023,the support capacity for county-level ur-ban development in Henan Province increased significantly,with an overall score growth of 77.4%,influenced by the"Quality En-hancement Project for 100 Cities"policy,the average annual growth rate reached 11.8% during 2015-2020,but slowed to 0.58% af-ter 2020.Significant spatial heterogeneity was observed,characterized by a pattern of"higher in the south and lower in the north,stron-ger in the east and weaker in the west".(2)The spatial agglomeration effect of County town development support in Henan Province had increased year by year,and the overall Moran index had increased from 0.094 in 2015 to 0.408 in 2023.(3)The impact of urbanization level,resident population and education expenditure on the supporting capacity of county-level urban development showed significant temporal and spatial changes,in which the urbanization effect had gradually shifted from the"core periphery"structure to the radiation driven mode of Zhengzhou metropolitan area,and the role of population agglomeration and education expenditure in improving the sup-porting capacity of urban development had been continuously enhanced.