Study of Spatial Pattern of County-level E-commerce and Its Influential Factors in Zhejiang Province, China

Abstract

Investigation of e-commerce spatial distribution pattern and its influence factors is very important. The study plays an important role in e-commerce-related industrial spatial layout, industrial structure optimization and balanced development of a regional economy. First of all, the paper studies the basic spatial pattern of e-commerce in Zhejiang province at city scale, and then further analyzes spatial development characteristics of e-commerce and its influencing factors in the province at the county level. All the investigation is conducted using a spatial analysis tool in ArcGIS and regression analysis in SPSS. The study shows that: (1) in city scale, e-commerce development level decreases gradually from the central of Zhejiang province to the outer areas; also it decreases from the west to the east of Zhejiang province; (2) in county scale, e-commerce development level is relatively high in the middle of the counties (county-level cities) in Zhejiang province, but the overall uneven e-commerce development is very obvious, and (3) number of Internet users, local finance income and postal business income are the key factors affecting the development of e-commerce in counties in Zhejiang province, while population and rural per capita disposable income have been proved not to be.