Pathway analysis of high-quality development of inland county-level economies in northwest China: a case study of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region

Based on the new development philosophy, this study constructs a comprehensive evaluation indicator system covering five dimensions of innovation, coordination, green development, openness, and shared development． Taking the 22 districts, county-level cities, and counties of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region as research samples, four analytical methods are employed for empirical analysis: firstly, the entropy-weighted technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is applied to measure the comprehensive level of county-level high-quality development and classify counties into different development tiers; secondly, the Theil index decomposition approach is applied to quantify regional disparities and identify their structural sources; thirdly, spatial autocorrelation analysis is applied to examine the spatial dependence and agglomeration patterns of county-level high-quality development; and fourthly, a partial least squares regression (PLSR) model is applied to identify the key influencing factors of county-level high-quality development． The results reveal that county-level high-quality development in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region exhibits a ladder-like differentiation pattern, with regional disparities mainly originating from inter-prefectural differences． Spatially, a three-tier pattern is observed, characterized by hotspot agglomeration in northern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, transitional and heterogeneous zone in central Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and random distribution in southern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region． Furthermore, the influencing factors exhibit a hierarchical structure．