Spatial differentiation and influencing factors of urban economic resilience: an empirical study from China

Given the intensifying geopolitical tensions, public health emergencies and frequent natural disasters, urban economic stability has become increasingly challenging, and determining how to achieve stable and high-quality urban economic development is a critical issue. In this study, the economic resilience of 286 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2008 to 2022 is evaluated via the CRITIC-TOPSIS method. Natural breakpoint classification, kernel density estimation, and geographical detector and MGWR models are adopted for hierarchical division, spatial evolution and heterogeneous driving factors. The key findings are as follows: (1) Urban economic resilience grows steadily with obvious hierarchical differentiation; the high-resilience areas are mainly large cities, whereas the level of resilience of small cities remains low. (2) Among the resilience subdimensions, resistance capacity is dominant, followed by recovery and innovation capacity, while innovation capacity shows the strongest growth momentum. (3) Spatially, eastern and central cities exhibit gradient agglomeration characteristics, whereas western and northeastern cities show prominent polarization. (4) The factors that influence display evident spatial heterogeneity. Digitalization, medical care and transportation positively affect resilience, and the effects increase from east to west. Urbanization has stronger positive effects in the eastern and central regions, whereas industrialization has inhibitory effects, particularly in resource-dependent cities. Transportation accessibility has dual effects on economic resilience.