A systematic literature review of city competitiveness: A 30-year assessment and future agenda for public administration

Figures & data

Figure 1. PRISMA flow.

Table 1. Coding scheme.

Category	Definition
Basic information	Author, publication, year, title, journal, and origin of research; extracted from the title page of the article
Research tradition (discipline)	We used the following categories: urban studies, regional science, public policy and administration, and geography and business
Definition of city competitiveness	We extracted the author’s definition of city competitiveness and then coded the perspectives of city competitiveness based on the conceptual framework by Begg (1999:;2002): Economic perspective Performance perspective Sustainable-development perspective Quality-of-life perspective
Analytical method	We classified each study as (a) having theoretical or empirical methods and (b) having quantitative or qualitative data
Measurement of city competitiveness	For empirical studies, we classified the data as being either subjective or objective, and then we classified each study’s measures as economic or strategic antecedents (borrowed from Kresl [1995))

Table 2. Disciplines of city-competitiveness research.

Area	Frequency	%
Urban studies and planning	55	47.83
Interdisciplinary	25	21.74
Public Administration and policy	16	13.91
Business and economics	13	11.30
Geography	4	3.51
Political science	2	1.75
Total	115	100

Figure 2. City-competitiveness research, 1990–2019.

Table 3. City-competitiveness research by 10 years.

Period	Published articles	% Total articles
1990–1999	15	13.0
2000–2009	36	31.3
2010–2019	64	55.7
Total	115	100

Table 4. Research methodology and empirical studies.

	1990–1999	2000–2009	2010–2019	All years
Research methodology
Theoretical	13	17	13	43
Empirical	2	19	51	72
Total	15	36	64	115
Research type of empirical studies
Quantitative	1	7	39	47
Qualitative	1	12	10	23
Mixed	0	0	2	2
Experiment	0	0	0	0
Total	2	19	51	72
Research region
Europe and central Asia	6	12	28	46 (40%)
East Asia and the Pacific	2	5	15	22 (19%)
North America	4	6	6	16 (14%)
Latin America	0	0	3	3 (2.6%)
South Asia	0	0	2	2 (1.7%)
the Middle East	0	1	0	1 (0.9%)
Africa	0	0	0	0 (0%)
Multiple locations	3	12	10	25 (21.8%)
Total	15	36	64	115

Table 5. Five most studied research areas or countries.

Geographic coverage	Frequency	% of total
EU cities	14	12.17
USA	12	10.43
China	11	9.57
UK	11	9.57
Australia	5	4.35
Lithuania	5	4.35

Table 6. An outlook of antecedents of city competitiveness (n = 24).

Economic antecedents	Frequency	Strategic antecedents	Frequency
Economic environment	29	Organizing capacity	10
Social environment and culture	21	Government performance	9
Infrastructure	20	Quality of life	8
External connectivity and network	14	Major events	6
Investment	7	Public–private partnership	1
Institutional quality	6
Location advantage	4
Subtotal	101	Subtotal	34

Figure 3. The dynamics of city competitiveness.

*Begg, I. 1999. “Cities and Competitiveness.” Urban Studies 36(5–6): 795–809. doi:10.1080/0042098993222.

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