Spatial Correlation in Urban Studies: Exploring Geographic and Economic Relationships

The present study identifies two distinct forms of spatial correlation, namely 'geographic' and 'economic' correlations. In the former, two weight matrices are utilized, namely the 'geographic adjacency matrix' w1, which is a binary variable indicating whether cities are adjacent or not, and the 'geographical distance weight matrix' w2, which is computed using the spherical distance between the longitude and latitude of the city center. The latter, on the other hand, is a matrix of 'economic distance weights', which are derived from the average GDP per capita data spanning from 2011 to 2019.