Spatial-Temporal Differentiation and Spatial Interaction Effect Analysis of Residents’ Consumption Capacity and Consumption Upgrading in China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The formulas around equation 1 may contain errors, and there is a mix of capitalized Y and small y. In S², a square may be missing.  The mentioned "Thayer index" should be explained.

Figure 1 does not show what is written below the graph. It shows a time-series plot of CSP by region.

Decimals in the numbers below Figure 1 should be reasonable, maybe one or two, not excessive.

There is no "constant decline". It may be a persistent decline.

In section 5.2, the statistical terminology is incorrect. Alternative hypotheses are not rejected. The null of "no Granger causality" is rejected at 1%. Alternatives are not accepted either. In table 4, the text "reasons why CSP is CSU's Granger" does not make sense.

Impulse response graphs in Figure 3 could be improved by introducing significance, for example via confidence intervals.

An issue with this paper is its language. I surmise that some of my problems in following the logical flow are based on unusual words. For example, a "consumption agent" may simply be a consumer. The wording is not wrong but irritating. By contrast, "consumption capacity promoting consumption upgrading" is entirely unclear, it sounds like an arbitrary cluster of words.

Otherwise, grammar is problematic. There are instances where an article "the" should be dropped, and others where two sentences should be fused into one (the first sentence of section 4.1, for example).

Beijing is clearly an important city. The wording "international consumption centre city" makes little sense however.

 

Author Response

Point 1: The formulas around equation 1 may contain errors, and there is a mix of capitalized Y and smally. In S², a square may be missing.  The mentioned "Thayer index" should be explained.

Response 1: This revision given by the reviewer was accepted. Thank you for reviewing our translations. We regret that some problems have arisen in the translation of the article and we have carefully checked the translation and made the following corrections.

(1) By re-finding the corresponding literature, we re-checked all the formulas covered in the article and revised them for possible errors.

(2) We apologise for the error in the translation of the concept "Theil index". We have replaced "Thayer index" with "Theil index" as it should be in the text. Theil index is first proposed by Theil and Henri in 1967, it is widely used to measure differences in levels of economic development between regions, but it suffers from the difficulty of addressing the problem of crossover between samples between regions.

Please check our translation again and feel free to contact us if you have any further questions or suggestions.

 

Point 2: Figure 1 does not show what is written below the graph. It shows a time-series plot of CSP by region.Decimals in the numbers below Figure 1 should be reasonable, maybe one or two, not excessive.There is no "constant decline". It may be a persistent decline.

Response 2: This revision given by the reviewer was accepted. After comparing the original program output with the Chinese text of the article, we found that the vertical axis was incorrectly set in the plotting of the CSU's Dagum Gini coefficient and decomposition results; at the same time, we also found that some of the content was translated incorrectly during the translation process. For this reason, we have revised and replaced the images in this section based on the original results and the Chinese writing to ensure that the relevant content descriptions are consistent with those presented in Figure 1 and t Figure 2. To ensure the objectivity of the results, we further provide detailed Dagum Gini coefficients and decomposition results for CSU and CSP (with three decimal places reserved), as shown in Tables 1 and 2.

 

Table1 The Dagum Gini coefficient and decomposition results of CSP

Year	Whole	Intra-regional Gini coefficient			Inter-regional Gini coefficient			Contribution (%)
		East	Central	West	Central-East	West-East	West-Central	intra-regional	inter-regional	Super-variable density
2008	0.220	0.184	0.048	0.103	0.239	0.348	0.144	23.004	75.988	1.007
2009	0.215	0.172	0.052	0.108	0.236	0.343	0.138	22.592	77.162	0.246
2010	0.180	0.145	0.055	0.082	0.209	0.287	0.106	22.248	77.088	0.664
2011	0.193	0.147	0.057	0.105	0.215	0.307	0.124	22.295	77.120	0.585
2012	0.180	0.133	0.063	0.105	0.199	0.284	0.122	22.333	75.536	2.131
2013	0.166	0.131	0.052	0.091	0.184	0.263	0.109	22.668	75.251	2.081
2014	0.166	0.125	0.064	0.092	0.183	0.262	0.114	22.413	75.241	2.346
2015	0.157	0.121	0.068	0.080	0.178	0.246	0.105	22.542	74.464	2.994
2016	0.156	0.126	0.070	0.069	0.182	0.244	0.099	22.644	74.104	3.252
2017	0.159	0.126	0.070	0.072	0.187	0.249	0.100	22.529	74.340	3.131
2018	0.160	0.127	0.074	0.086	0.180	0.246	0.107	23.494	73.008	3.498
2019	0.159	0.132	0.068	0.084	0.178	0.243	0.105	23.933	72.603	3.463
2020	0.151	0.130	0.054	0.075	0.171	0.235	0.097	23.625	73.919	2.455
Average	0.174	0.138	0.061	0.089	0.196	0.274	0.113	22.794	75.063	2.143

 

 

 

Table2 The Dagum Gini coefficient and decomposition results of CSU

YEAR	Whole	Intra-regional Gini coefficient			Inter-regional Gini coefficient			Contribution (%)
		East	Central	West	Central-East	West-East	West-Central	intra-regional	inter-regional	Super-variable density
2008	0.251	0.221	0.066	0.129	0.308	0.372	0.115	25.170	74.830	0.000
2009	0.234	0.227	0.046	0.117	0.294	0.341	0.096	26.515	73.485	0.000
2010	0.234	0.220	0.042	0.123	0.296	0.343	0.099	26.039	73.961	0.000
2011	0.229	0.207	0.044	0.126	0.292	0.335	0.100	25.663	74.295	0.042
2012	0.223	0.204	0.051	0.125	0.284	0.324	0.101	25.937	72.847	1.216
2013	0.214	0.193	0.057	0.112	0.275	0.314	0.094	25.457	73.923	0.621
2014	0.204	0.189	0.060	0.113	0.258	0.296	0.096	26.137	72.193	1.670
2015	0.199	0.191	0.054	0.105	0.255	0.290	0.088	26.402	72.205	1.393
2016	0.202	0.192	0.054	0.104	0.260	0.296	0.088	26.085	72.455	1.460
2017	0.200	0.188	0.056	0.099	0.259	0.294	0.087	25.736	72.987	1.277
2018	0.199	0.189	0.068	0.093	0.254	0.293	0.090	25.944	72.743	1.312
2019	0.204	0.187	0.068	0.094	0.257	0.303	0.093	25.348	73.799	0.853
2020	0.213	0.193	0.065	0.103	0.267	0.317	0.100	25.219	73.180	1.602
Average	0.216	0.200	0.056	0.111	0.274	0.317	0.096	25.819	73.300	0.880

 

 

Point 3: In section 5.2, the statistical terminology is incorrect. Alternative hypotheses are not rejected. The null of "no Granger causality" is rejected at 1%. Alternatives are not accepted either. In table 4, the text "reasons why CSP is CSU's Granger" does not make sense.

 

Response 3: This revision given by the reviewer was accepted.The section has been reworked to ensure that the statistical terminology is correct, with reference to the original data output from the original software and the Chinese writing.

 

Point 4: Impulse response graphs in Figure 3 could be improved by introducing significance, for example via confidence intervals.

Response 4: Since Beenstock and Felsenstein proposed the spatial vector autoregressive model in 2008, the SPVAR model has been used in practice, but as the model is a frontier econometric model, there are still many areas that need to be analysed and studied in depth, among which the software implementation and output is one of the issues that need to be addressed. The current Matlab-based SPVAR model can output impulse response values, but it is still unable to output confidence intervals for impulse response values in the same way as the traditional VAR. In the future, we will further strengthen this area of research in order to obtain more comprehensive and accurate SPVAR model estimation results. Some of the outputs are shown in Table 3:

 

Table 3 Example output of the corresponding estimates of the SPVAR model impulses

N.	Beijing	Tianjin	Hebei	Shanxi	Neimenggu	Liaoning	Jilin	Heilongjiang	Shanghai	Jiangsu
1	1.14745	0.00000	0.00000	0.00000	0.00000	0.00000	0.00000	0.00000	0.00000	0.00000
2	-0.19971	0.15570	0.06004	0.03039	0.04851	0.03171	0.01563	0.01448	0.00364	0.00459
3	0.12169	0.03531	0.02102	0.01466	0.01736	0.01335	0.00901	0.00806	0.00228	0.00284
4	0.00646	0.02772	0.01861	0.01398	0.01559	0.01243	0.00915	0.00830	0.00249	0.00305
5	0.01855	0.01420	0.00951	0.00749	0.00818	0.00664	0.00542	0.00512	0.00173	0.00204
6	0.00639	0.00760	0.00598	0.00500	0.00521	0.00442	0.00377	0.00356	0.00130	0.00151
7	0.00449	0.00433	0.00330	0.00280	0.00293	0.00252	0.00225	0.00217	0.00088	0.00099
8	0.00224	0.00233	0.00193	0.00169	0.00173	0.00153	0.00140	0.00135	0.00059	0.00066
9	0.00131	0.00132	0.00108	0.00096	0.00098	0.00089	0.00083	0.00081	0.00038	0.00042
10	0.00072	0.00073	0.00062	0.00056	0.00057	0.00052	0.00049	0.00048	0.00024	0.00026
11	0.00041	0.00041	0.00035	0.00032	0.00033	0.00030	0.00029	0.00028	0.00015	0.00016
12	0.00023	0.00023	0.00020	0.00018	0.00019	0.00017	0.00017	0.00017	0.00010	0.00010
13	0.00013	0.00013	0.00011	0.00011	0.00011	0.00010	0.00010	0.00010	0.00006	0.00006

Unit: %

 

Point 5: Comments on the Quality of English Language. An issue with this paper is its language. I surmise that some of my problems in following the logical flow are based on unusual words. For example, a "consumption agent" may simply be a consumer. The wording is not wrong but irritating. By contrast, "consumption capacity promoting consumption upgrading" is entirely unclear, it sounds like an arbitrary cluster of words. Otherwise, grammar is problematic. There are instances where an article "the" should be dropped, and others where two sentences should be fused into one (the first sentence of section 4.1, for example).Beijing is clearly an important city. The wording "international consumption centre city" makes little sense however.

Response 5: This revision given by the reviewer was accepted. Thank you for reviewing our article and providing feedback on the language. We have made revisions to the article as per your request and hope that these changes will make the article more clear and understandable. We appreciate your valuable input and will continue to strive for improving the quality of our articles.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is well-written and interesting. I can find only minor issues that need to be addressed in order to make the manuscript suitable for publication. Please find my remarks below:

1. In tables 1 and 2 I recommend to make current lines thicker and add more thin lines to separate the groups of indicators (Resident income, social security, etc.). Now we can only guess, which specific indicator belongs to which group.

2. In table 3 I think that the columns p-value are superfluous, when the asterisks presenting the significance levels, are provided.

3. There is something wrong with the description of subscripts i and t under the equation (3).

4. Please put more attention in the notation of references and citations. Now they are not in line with the formal requirements.

English is mostly fine, I just noticed some missing spaces.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

 

Point 1: In tables 1 and 2 I recommend to make current lines thicker and add more thin lines to separate the groups of indicators (Resident income, social security, etc.). Now we can only guess, which specific indicator belongs to which group.

Response 1: This revision given by the reviewer was accepted. With reference to the journal's submission instructions and the published literature, we have reformatted Forms 1 and 2 to separate the groups of indicators by setting up table lines, etc.

 

Point 2: In table 3 I think that the columns p-value are superfluous, when the asterisks presenting the significance levels, are provided.

Response 2: This revision given by the reviewer was accepted. Considering that the z-values corresponding to the Moran index are already provided in Table 3 and have been identified at what level they are significant, the p-values corresponding to the Moran values will be removed from this paper.

 

Point 3: There is something wrong with the description of subscripts i and t under the equation (3).

Response 3: This revision given by the reviewer was accepted. By re-finding the corresponding literature, we re-checked all the formulas covered in the article and revised them for possible errors.

 

Point 4: Please put more attention in the notation of references and citations. Now they are not in line with the formal requirements.

Response 4: This revision given by the reviewer was accepted. With reference to the journal's submission instructions and published literature, we have revised the notation of references and citations in the article to ensure that it can better meet the journal's requirements.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf