Evaluation on the development and trend of China´s STIP´s by using cluster analysis method

Summary form only given. China has 53 Science and Technology Industrial Parks (STIPs) at state level. The purpose of the STIPs is to establish and develop new and high-tech industries in China with a market orientation. After a preliminary stage of development, the STIPs have greatly promoted China´s economy. However, these parks differ in many respects, such as founding time, infrastructure, intelligence basis, operation mechanism, effects, investment environment, management level, economic scale, developing emphasis, etc. In order to strengthen the management of STIPs, it´s very important for the government to know the difference and similarity among these parks. Evaluation should be considered as an essential component of management. The Chinese government has committed to evaluating the STIPs for years. Despite that, it has not found a perfect method to evaluate. As far as we know, no study of evaluation on these complex parks has been conducted with clustering methods, which we consider a valuable attempt. Cluster analysis is employed in this paper and some new methods are used to analyze the cluster results, such as multidimensional clustering and trend analysis by clusters changing. In this investigation, the principal component analysis is dealt with first, and then hierarchical agglomerative methods are applied to cluster STIPs, and finally we make use of discriminant analysis to determine whether the cluster results differ from each other