Intelligentization and regional industrial competitiveness

Intelligentization-oriented development is a fast-developing
trend of technological revolution. It promotes the reconstruction of the
industrial system of a region and affects its overall industrial
competitiveness. We collected data of 28 provinces and cities in
China from 2003 to 2017 to test the influence of
industrial intelligentization level on the industrial
competitiveness of a region. Compared with the existing literature, the
innovation of this study lies in three aspects: (1) We
focuse on China, a developing country with the fastest development of
intelligent technology in the world, to discuss the relationship between
intelligentization and industrial competitiveness in developing
countries. (2) The research on intelligent technology mainly
focuses on the micro level, for instance the change of the
internal structure of the industry, which belongs to the category of
industrial economics. The research perspective of this study is macro
level, taking regions as the research object, focusing on the change of
industrial competitiveness between regions in the era of
intelligentization, which belongs to the category of economic
geography. (3) According to the actual situation of the
development of intelligent technology in China, we improve and construct
the index system to evaluate the level of intelligentization. At the same
time, the ecological niche theory is introduced for the first time in the
process of evaluating industrial competitiveness of each region.
The result reveals that: 1) In China's provincial
jurisdictions, the higher the level of
intelligentization is, the lower the overall level of industrial
competitiveness and the lower the proportion of industry in the
economic system will be. In regions where the facilities
are highly intelligentialized, the production
sectors tend to move to the less developed regions, and
the growth effect of technological dividends is the focus. 2)
Compared with the middle region and the Western
region of China, the Eastern region, which is more developed with
higher intelligentization level, has stronger ability in the research and
development (R&D) of technologies, and the economic
structure of the industry there tends to be stable, manifesting a strong
growth potential.