Identification and evaluation of the evolution stage of the agricultural machinery industry cluster in Shandong Province

Abstract

Agricultural machinery industry clusters have great potential to solve key technological problems in China, and it is crucial to accurately identify the stage of cluster evolution. Based on the location entropy method, this paper finds that the location quotient coefficient is greater than 1.2 and the average annual growth rate is 1.11%, which indicates that the agricultural machinery industry in Shandong Province has a high degree of agglomeration, but the agglomeration speed is slow. Using the Groundings agglomeration—Economic network—Social network—Service system model, it is found that the agricultural machinery industry cluster in Shandong province is in the growth stage, in which the service system has the most significant influence on its development level. The weights of service system, social network, economic network, and basic resource aggregation derived from the Analytic Hierarchy Process model are 0.410, 0.321, 0.151, and 0.118, respectively, where agglomeration degree of the agricultural machinery industry, raw material production of agricultural machinery enterprises, exchange of tacit knowledge and intermediary service level are the four indicators with the greatest weights in the influences on sustainable development of the agricultural machinery industry. Because of the strong fuzzy nature between the indicators, this paper applies the Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation method to quantify the stage of evolution of Shandong Province's agricultural machinery industry cluster.