Higher Education Fiscal Spending and Universities Competitiveness:Spatial Features and DrivingForces Recognition

Fiscal Spending on Higher Education is a key factor in promoting competitiveness of universities, which provides economical foundation and booster. Based on establishing indexes of higher education fiscal spending and competitiveness of universities and colleges, the research comprehensively leverage Coupling Degree Model, Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis and GeoDetector Model to discuss the spatial features and driving forces of coupling degree between higher education fiscal spending and competitiveness of universities and colleges. The result shows that coupling degrees among provinces are low and have obvious differential spatial features, with the spatial structure characteristics of disequilibrium in the whole and local clustering. The coupling degrees show that there is positive relationship between the higher education fiscal spending and competitiveness of universities which is divided mostly along the Hu's Line. On the southeast side of Hu's Line most regions are hot spots clustering area while on the northwest of Hu's Line most regions are cold spots clustering area. From the state view, government regulation plays an important role in guiding the coupling degrees, factors of coupling degree in eastern region are diversified and hierarchical and innovation boosting, faculty promoting, investment pulling, urbanization impelling, regional endowment play primary functions in the coupling degrees. Talent training structure, social serving, innovation boosting, and faculty promoting playing the primary roles in central region. In western region the coupling spatial difference mainly belongs to policy promoting type and talent training structure and investment pulling also have strong explanatory powers. In northeastern region the coupling degrees are mainly affected by government regulation, innovation boosting, talent training structure and faculty promoting.