LAUSR

ABSTRACT Urban logistics is critical for realising urban economic efficiency, and its rapid development holds great potential for improving urban competitiveness. This research looked at eighteen cities in China’s Sichuan Province, analysing factors including gross regional product (GRP), total freight traffic, and revenue from postal services to build an evaluation index system of urban logistics competitiveness (ULC) based on economic-development levels, logistics-business scale and informatization levels. ULC for the eighteen sample cities was evaluated and classified through factor analysis and cluster analysis using SPSS 24.0 software. Various city groups were compared and analysed to determine spatial distributions of ULC by calculating the logistics location quotient (LQ) for each city, then using ArcGIS 10.5 to determine the evolution of spatial structure from 2004 to 2014. Through factor analysis and cluster analysis, it was found that the cities could be divided into four clusters according to their levels of comprehensive logistics competitiveness. Furthermore, spatial evolution analysis revealed that the spatial pattern of urban logistics across Sichuan was characterised by the evolution from ‘three groups and multiple nodes' to ‘one center, two poles and multiple nodes.'