Yu, H. and Xing, L., 2021. Analysis of the spatiotemporal differences in the quality of marine economic growth in China. Journal of Coastal Research, 37(3), 589–600. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.

Scientifically measuring the quality of marine economic growth and fully understanding the actual state of and trends in the evolution of marine economic growth in China are necessary tasks for ensuring the high-quality development of the marine economy. Guided by five development concepts, an evaluation index system is constructed in this article, and the comprehensive entropy weight method is used to measure the spatial and temporal characteristics of the evolution of the quality of marine economic growth in China. The results were as follows. First, the quality of China's marine economic growth was increasing from 2004–2016, and the growth quality index rose significantly from 0.2066 to 0.7753. The central coastal areas from Shandong to Guangdong developed rapidly, with growth range of Guangdong, Shandong, and Shanghai of 0.5644, 0.5329, and 0.5820, respectively, ranking these areas as the top three. However, there are significant differences in provincial-level development, such as the very large gap between Guangdong Province (0.8622) and Guangxi Province (0.6810) in 2016. Second, the quality of China's marine economic growth was high in middle coastal regions and low in the southern and northern coastal regions, with improvements gradually spreading from the middle to the northern and southern regions. Third, the contribution of each of the five concepts—innovation, greenness, coordination, sharing, and openness—is ranked, and each exhibited an upward trend over the sample period. Therefore, measures that implement the five development concepts take advantage of spatial spillover effects and improve the comparative advantage of provinces with high-quality development must be undertaken to cooperatively advance the high-quality development of the marine economy.