Fund is one of the most important factors of regional economic growth and social development, and the spatial distribution of funds plays an important role in the distribution of regional development activities. Sound distribution of funds will help narrow the gap in regional development, or otherwise the gap will be widening. Various factors drive the distribution of different types of funds and there are significant variations between the spatial distributions of market fund and government fund, with the results that different areas have different ratios of such funds. Coordinating the allocation of market and government funds is an effective guarantee of smooth implementation of Major Function Oriented Zone(MFOZ) Planning. Within a particular region, different types of MFOZs are confronted with different fund constraints and fund needs. They also have different abilities to attract the two types of funds. Theoretical analysis shows that while market fund focuses on efficiency, government fund emphasizes fairness. Thus, because of their varied levels and potentials of economic development, Development-Optimized Regions have higher attractiveness to market funds as compared to Development- Prioritized Regions, and Development Regions have higher attractiveness than Restricted Regions. Nevertheless, based on the request of the national planning of MFOZs, Restricted Regions must protect food security and their ecological integrity, which also require a large amount of fund supply. The large gap between the demand and supply of market funds should be reduced by government funding, which leads to different funding structures in different MFOZs. This paper verifies the above theoretical analysis using data from 12 provincial- level administrative units that have issued Major Function Oriented Zones Planning, with two indices: degree of market fund utilization index and state financing dependency index. We found that: (1) There is an inverse relationship between these two indices, that is, the regions that have better potential of attracting market funds received less central government funding. (2) The provincial scale analysis for county fund data shows that the proportion of market fund from high to low is as follows: Development-Optimized Region, Development- Prioritized Region, Development-Restricted Region. (3) The empirical finding is not entirely consistent with the theoretical analysis results, because industrial upgrading pressure in Development-Optimized Regions is not completely translated into fund overflow pressure. (4) Based on the experiences of areas that underwent the most successful economy transition, regional industrial upgrading should be implemented through the process of "economic downturn and rebound". (5) More government funds should be diverted to Development-Optimized Regions as well as Development-Restricted Regions in order to balance production development and livelihood improvement considerations.

The interrelation between socioeconomic and environmental conditions and ecological carrying capacity is one of the most important themes of sustainable development studies in recent years. At different spatial and temporal scales, ecological carrying capacity responds to regional social, economic, and environmental changes in varying degrees. Using sustainable development index and ecological carrying capacity response model, the social, economic, and environmental changes and corresponding ecological carrying capacity change of the Dongting Lake Region from 2001 to 2010 were analyzed. The results indicate that: (1) For the lake region as a whole, economic development degree and social harmonization degree showed an upward trend; integrity and sustainability of ecosystems showed an positive change; while environmental sustainability degree declined. (2) Development degree, harmonization degree and sustainable degree of 17 counties of the Dongting Lake Region showed an upward trend; in the urban areas of Yueyang, Changde and Yiyang development and harmonization degrees were higher than the other 14 counties, while environmental sustainability degree decreased most significantly. (3) Ecological carrying capacity was divided into four categories: severely overload, overload, slightly under-load and under-load. The urban areas of Yueyang, Changde and Yiyang had higher levels of socioeconomic development, but the status of their ecological carrying capacity was severely overload, which indicates that economic development, social progress, resource use and environmental quality were poorly balanced. (4) Regression analysis of ecological carrying capacity, economic development degree, social harmonization degree, environmental sustainability degree, and sustainable development index show that, to some extent, environmental sustainability degree became an important foundation for improving ecological carrying capacity. The present destructive economic development model has become an obstacle for enhancing ecological carrying capacity. Due to the fact that the rapid socioeconomic development depends too much on resource exploitation and disturbances to the regional environment and ecology, the influence of environmental sustainability on ecological carrying capacity and sustainable development index is rather weak and economic development is largely at the cost of the ecological environment. This result provides a basis for the country to implement the scientific concept of development, build a harmonious society and achieve sustainable development of its regional economy, society, environment and ecology.

At present, China is in the process of rapid urbanization. The traditional urban development approach urgently needs to be transformed into a new urbanization model that is intelligent, green and low-carbon. Meanwhile, coordinated urban-rural development and regional integrative development have gained greater importance. In order to systematically assess the quality of China's urbanization under the new situation, the comprehensive assessment method of regional PRED system was proposed considering the complicated relationship between population, resources, environment and economic and social development(PRED), which are mutually stimulating but also restricting. This paper proposes the concept and characterization method of regional PRED carrying capacity. By learning from the Pressure-State-Response(PSR) model, the assessment index system of regional PRED on Carrying capacity-Pressure-State-Response was established. A comprehensive responsiveness and emergency response grade categorization method was proposed to assess regional PRED system by multi-objective planning and decision making. Using Dalian city as an example, this study empirically analyzes the above-mentioned concept, model, assessment index system and assessment method. The results show that during 2000-2012, PRED system of Dalian was in a state of overload, that regional population carrying capacity decreased from 3630 thousand to 2910 thousand persons. Compared with nationwide levels, the pressure of Dalian PRED system was relative low with a decreasing trend: the load index of regional PRED system dropped from 0.97 to 0.85. Comprehensive responsiveness of regional PRED in Dalian was above 0.6 and emergency response grade was GradeⅡ(orange) or Grade Ⅲ(yellow). The results indicate that because of resource scarcity and environmental degradation, the population carrying capacity of Dalian was gradually decreasing. Due to the continuous development of economy and social security, the pressure of urbanization in Dalian has been relieved. In the future, relevant government departments should seek to actively solve the problem of resources and environmental constraints of new urbanization, resolve the conflicts that hindered the sustainable development of economy and society, promote regional coordinated development through reasonably managing the urban size and resources allocation and practicing environmental protection, industrial transformation and livelihood security improvement. By comparing with similar studies and further discussion, the results of this paper are considered as reliable and conforming to the reality of Dalian in population, resources, environment and economic and social development. The concept of regional PRED carrying capacity and the assessment index system based on the carrying capacity PSR model and multi-objective decision-making method provide a new thought and method to quantitatively assess the quality of urbanization and regional sustainable development.

Urban housing price differentiation is an important issue in urban geography. Given the current high prices of housing in China, spatial variation of inner city housing prices becomes an important part of the Chinese urban geographic studies. Housing prices in China have become the focus of concern for both the government and urban residents, had significant implications for social justice and stability, improvement of living standards, enhancement of residential satisfaction and social harmony, as well as become the key issue in sustainable urbanization and the healthy development of real estate markets. Therefore, housing prices has become the core issue that is paid close attention by all levels of governments and inhabitants. The focus of this research is to examine determinants and dynamics of spatial differentiation of housing price in Yangzhou. In this paper, all types of residential areas located in Yangzhou are investigated, with the living quarters(or residential groups) taken as the basic research unit, with data in 2012. As the study included ordinary commercial housing, attached and detached houses, high-end commercial and residential apartments, housing-reform quarters, affordable houses and single-storey cottages, that is, all housing types that can be sold on the market, the result of this investigation is much more reliable compared to other studies that analyzed only ordinary commercial housing. Our appraisal system of urban housing price differentiation composed of 20 evaluation factors, four determinants and four expectation factors. The four determinants contain building(architectural) characteristics, residential quarter characteristics, location and convenience features, and landscape and environmental characteristics. The four expectation factors are displacement and resettlement, residential quarter renewal, urban spatial development strategy, and landscape and environmental renovations. Based on the evaluation and expectation factors, we calculated the scores of the four determinants in all residential groups, and analyzed their spatial differentiation patterns. Linear regression was performed between the dependent variable-housing prices of the 1305 residential quarters in Yangzhou in 2012, and the independent variables: the four determinants of price. The main influence factors of the city-wide housing market and sub-markets were evaluated by regression against housing prices. The results show that: (1) spatial patterns of the four determinants' scores are clearly different. Building characteristics and residential quarter characteristics scores show a low(center district) to high(outskirts) differentiation with concentric circles. Scores of location and convenience and landscape and environment characteristics are high in the west and center districts, and low in the east district and outskirts. (2) The key determinant of housing price is residential quarter characteristics in Yangzhou. There exist different key determinants for respective housing sub-markets. (3) The main dynamics of spatial differentiation of housing prices are as follows: locational direction on dwelling construction of particular housing types, spatial agglomeration of particular income groups, spatial inequality of investment in public commodity and locational direction on urban residential expansion and urban redevelopment. These dynamics acted on the four determinants and generated the observed spatial differentiation of housing prices in Yangzhou.

Economic activity is socially constructed and historically determined by individual and collective actions expressed through organizations and institutions. Along with the development of economic geography, institution and culture tend to be hotspots in this subject realm. The theories of new economic geography that contain new regionalism economic geography, cultural economic geography, relationship economic geography, evolution economic geography among others are gradually being built and improved. More scholars began to pay close attention to the non-economic factors that influence regional economic development. In this process, the concept of "embeddedness" that came from the new economic sociology is increasingly becoming a key word. And it has gained much prominence in economic geography over the last decade, as much work has been done on the social and organizational foundations of economic activities and regional development. This article analyzes the progress in research of creative industry development from the perspective of embeddedness. It starts with the use and development of the concept of "embeddednes" in economic geography. Economic geographers developed the conception of "embeddedness". They pointed out that it includes three dimensions: (1) "Cultural and institutional embeddedness", which means that economic behaviors are always affected by the special culture, institution, religious and morality, which are like genes embedded in the action of economic behaviors. The degree and behaviors of interpersonal trust, dependence and information sharing are affected by cultural tradition and value criterion and institution. (2) "Territorial embeddedness", that is, economic behaviors are always embedded in the local environment. The territorial related relationship will affect the behavior of economic actors. (3) "Network embeddedness", that is, a lot of formal and informal contacts between economic actors form network organizations. So everyone in the network is always affected by the network structure and his position in the network. Those new conceptions put forward by geographers are more detailed and have "space" meaning when compared with the traditional conception of economic sociology. The article also discusses the necessity and importance of doing research on the development of regional creative industry from the perspective of embeddedness. Based on the three dimensions of "embeddedness", this article reviews related literature and summarizes as well as comments on related research achievements in this field. In the end, the article discusses the outlook of future economic geography research of creative industry development from the perspective of embeddedness. Furthermore, the article points out that the research of "embeddedness" of the regional economics is not only an important area where Chinese scholars are able to participate in international economic geography theory building, dialogues and debates, but also an important direction for mainstream economic geography to promote its localization construction, hence it has important significance both theoretically and practically. Scholars should continue to put into energy to carry out in-depth studies.

Productivity has always been one of the key research areas in both economics and geography, which relates to the source and quality of economic growth. In the paradigm of productivity research, manufacturing, as the core sector in the economic system, has attracted growing interests of scholars. China is currently experiencing a profound transformation from a big manufacturing country to a powerful manufacturing country. Manufacturing industry productivity has a great impact on the position of China in the global value chain. Against this background, this paper has provided a comprehensive review on manufacturing industry productivity research. The research on manufacturing productivity will lead to improving the efficiency of resource use and optimizing industrial distribution. The paper summarized the theoretical developments of manufacturing industry productivity research in different stages from three aspects: definition and research area, source of the productivity growth, and productivity growth path. The concept of manufacturing productivity can be discussed in two ways: single factor productivity and total factor productivity. Single factor productivity relates one input to outputs. Whereas, total factor productivity expresses the ratio of all outputs produced to all resources used. Based on Cobb-Douglas production function, capital and labor are the main dominant inputs of a production process taking technological improvements as exogenous assumption. With the development of the productivity study, the exogenous technological improvements assumption was break. The endogenous growth theory and the agglomeration theory emphasized the role of information spillover and externality. We generalized the contributing empirical research on manufacturing industry productivity. It's evident that fixed asset investment, foreign trade and export, foreign direct investment, institutional and policy environment, industrial agglomeration all affected manufacturing productivity. However, no unanimous conclusions have been obtained on how these factors impacted manufacturing productivity. One of the heated discussions is the relationship between export and manufacturing productivity. Some researchers found that exporting boosted firm productivity by expanding market opportunities, while others hold that only the most productive firms could become exporting enterprises. Compared with the empirical research in the West, we found that the factors influencing manufacturing productivity in China were more complicated in the Chinese economic environment. In general, the manufacturing productivity research in China has made remarkable progress especially in the aspect of empirical research. However, it lacked localized theoretical system, and was short of attention to the unique historical, geographic and policy background of manufacturing industry in China. Therefore, the manufacturing industry productivity research in China could more focus on the following aspects in the future: (1) constructing localized theoretical framework that is suitable for manufacturing industry productivity research in China; (2) exploring the spatial and industrial heterogeneity of manufacturing industry productivity by introducing multiple spatial analysis methods; and (3) regional manufacturing structure shift and productivity evolution under the background of the global industrial chain division and the domestic and international industry shift. Research on Chinese manufacturing productivity is useful for enhancing the competitiveness of the manufacturing industry in China.