Urban vitality generally refers to the ability to attract lively businesses and human activities, which largely depends on the urban built environment and human flows. Previous studies that applied the empirical approach to analyze urban vitality from the feature of the urban built environment and the behavior of residents are scarce. This study developed a novel framework for exploring urban vitality on the street scale with geographic big data in Xiamen Island—a livable city in southern China. We measured urban vitality and analyzed its characteristics using the Shannon entropy model based on four dimensions of GIS-based data on the point of interest density, taxi flow density, building density, and road density. We then apply the regression model to explore the relationship between land-use diversity and urban vitality. Results show that four dimensions are associated with urban vitality. Furthermore, the dimensions of the taxi flow density and the road density in low vitality blocks can be distinguishable from other blocks. Results showed a stronger relationship between land-use diversity and urban vitality. The urban expansion direction of Xiamen Island is from the old town around the Xiamen Port to the new district around Yundang Lake to form a continuous covered area, which significantly impacts urban vitality. The approach of this study not only measures urban vitality through human activity but also sheds light on guidelines for sustainable urban development, which can plan and policy in practice for cities in China and many other countries.

Imbalances in allocating public service resources are a universal problem worldwide, especially in urban and rural areas. As a developing country with a significant imbalance between urban and rural areas, China is representative of the unbalanced allocation of public service resources. Presently, China has entered the county urbanization stage. Therefore, this study can provide a new way to realize the equalization of urban and rural public services with the county as the basic unit. Taking counties as the primary study area, this paper analyzes the new trends of population mobility in China’s counties. It combines large-scale questionnaires and field surveys to investigate the new demand of rural residents for public services and the shortcomings of public service resource allocation. First, the county seat attracts a concentration of the county’s rural residents and returning population, whose high expectations for the county seat’s education and medical services have not yet been met. Second, the township assumes the vital function of elementary school education and medical services in rural areas, and the rural children have a great demand for elementary school education services in the township. However, there are still apparent shortcomings in support of teaching facilities and the quality of education services. Third, the problem of aging and hollowing out in rural areas is serious, and the education, medical and elderly service needs of left-behind children and the elderly are difficult to be guaranteed. Finally, this paper proposes targeted planning strategies and policy recommendations for allocating county public service resources at three levels based on the “county–town–village” hierarchy.

Against the background of globalization, institutional embeddedness has become an important theoretical tool to understand the changes in regional economic patterns. This paper starts by discussing the theory of location choice of enterprises and then uses the statistical method of negative binomial regression to analyze the impact factors of enterprises’ transfer from the perspective of institutional embeddedness by taking Guangdong Province, China, as a case study area. It was found that informal institutional factors such as the same language, the same industry, and geographical proximity have significant positive effects on the transfer of regional enterprises. Formal institutions such as counterpart assistance are the core driving force of enterprise transfer, while traditional economic factors such as cost comparative advantage have no significant impact on the transfer of regional enterprises. This research shows that the transfer of regional enterprises is greatly influenced by the current regional institutional environment. Therefore, it is important for future policy makers to consider the regional institutional environment and to deepen regional institutional embeddedness to advance urban and regional development.

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Return migration has been considered advantageous to the productivity of labor and the economic development of origin regions and countries. However, how and why return migrants make their investment decisions and how such processes contribute to poverty alleviation remains unclear. This study evaluated how migration experience influences rural families' choices for productive investments and the underlying mechanism of village poverty alleviation. The result indicates that, when all are given the same monetary budgets, return migrants are more inclined to invest in single agricultural‐related subjects rather than multiple subjects. A concentrated investment implies the investor's intention of expanding the production scale, which can further lead to a more organized, professional agricultural production that can be considered beneficial for community poverty alleviation. Moreover, different approaches of human capital accumulation led to varied capacity growth, among which migration experience effectively enhances the non‐cognitive ability of return migrants. Based on these findings, we suggest that more returnee‐preferential policies, supporting production and organization services should be established to promote agricultural entrepreneurship among the returning groups in poor rural areas.