Chapter 2 Research Methodology

This chapter will proceed to describe the theoretical and empirical methods used to construct the liveability framework. In particular, the chapter begins with a detailed description of the conceptual framework for liveability in the China Liveable Cities Index (CLCI), including the environments and sub-environments that define the index. Subsequently, the chapter will describe the technical aspects of the methodology, including the indicators, data sources and algorithms used for the computation of rankings. In particular, additional emphasis is placed on several novel features added to the empirical estimations in the 2019 CLCI, such as the Shapley weight method.