The Impact of Fixed Assets Investment on The Growth of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Industries: A Case Study of Liaoning, China

This research examines panel data from 14 cities in Liaoning Province from 2003 to 2024 to investigate the impact of fixed assets investment on the development of primary, secondary, and tertiary industries. It further analyzes the heterogeneous characteristics of industrial development across these cities. First, panel regression model was constructed. The Hausman test indicated the appropriateness of a fixed effects specification, and time effect were subsequently introduced to establish a two-way fixed effects model. The results demonstrate that investments in agriculture and forestry significantly promote the primary industry, while investments in manufacturing and construction drive the growth of the secondary industry. For the tertiary industry, investments in information services, environmental governance, and social welfare exert a significant positive impact. Subsequently, a city feature matrix was constructed by extracting the sensitivity of urban fixed effects and time effects, combined with indicators such as the coefficient of variation, trend slope, and dominant frequency amplitude. The Fuzzy C-Means clustering method was then applied to classify the 14 cities in Liaoning. The clustering results reveal that the primary and secondary industries display three structural types, whereas the tertiary industry displays two. Notably, Shenyang and Dalian exhibit prominent characteristics as core growth poles in regional industrial development These findings reveal differentiated pathways for urban industrial evolution in Liaoning Province, providing a valuable reference for optimizing regional industrial layouts and formulating targeted fixed assets investment policies.

Fixed Assets Investment, Two-way Fixed Effects Model, Industrial Development, Fuzzy C-Means Clustering, Urban Heterogeneity

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