Spatio-temporal Coupling Analysis of Population Urbanization and Economic Development in Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration

Population urbanization and economic development are highly correlated, and the degree of coordination between the two has gradually become one of the important issues for the healthy development of the region. With the advancement of high-quality integration in the Yangtze River Delta, it is particularly important to clarify the coupling and coordination process and spatial differentiation between population urbanization and economic development for the future integration and sustainable development of the Yangtze River Delta region. Given this, we establish a comprehensive evaluation index system of population urbanization and economic development based on the period of 2009–2020. Taking the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration as the research object, the entropy method and the coupling coordination model are used to carry out Spatio-temporal coupling analysis. The results show that (1) the level of population urbanization and economic development of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration is continuously rising, while economic development lags behind population urbanization development, and the economic development level needs to be further improved. The degree of coupling coordination of population urbanization and economic development has continued to increase, and the synergistic development effect of the two has been improved, (2) the comprehensive level of population urbanization and economic development of each city in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration shows an obvious inter-regional unbalanced development trend, and (3) there is an obvious polarization in the coupling coordination level between population urbanization and economic development in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration.