Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-27-2026

Journal / Book Title

Sustainability

Abstract

Index-based urban sustainability studies often ask whether urban resilience and economic development evolve harmoniously, but the answer is unreliable when the two constructs contain the same economic indicators. A targeted audit of recent Chinese coupling studies shows that economic variables are commonly embedded in urban-resilience systems without a reported construct-overlap weight check. Using Hebei, China, as a measurement-validity test rather than as another provincial economic-growth case, this study analyzes a balanced 2014–2023 panel of 11 prefecture-level cities. Duplicated economic concepts account for 44.4% of the baseline resilience-index entropy weight and 88.2% of the baseline economic-index weight, indicating substantial mechanical exposure in the resilience-development correlation (Pearson 𝑟=0.953). We, therefore, construct a measured non-economic service-infrastructure-ecological resilience-capacity index and a separate economic-development index. The redesigned index is not a comprehensive urban-resilience measure because it excludes governance, social capital, emergency response, hazard exposure, social vulnerability, and institutional adaptation. Removing only the shared resilience-side components lowers the all-year correlation to 0.783; after full redesign, it is 0.562. In constant 2014 prices, economic development rises sharply from 2014 to 2023, whereas measured non-economic resilience capacity improves modestly. Robustness tests separate stable city findings from measurement-sensitive ones: Langfang and Shijiazhuang remain economy-ahead across all 13 selected specifications, while Cangzhou does so in 11 of 13, Tangshan is economy-ahead in 11 of 13 selected specifications but sensitive to the gas-supply proxy, and Qinhuangdao and Xingtai remain measured-capacity-ahead across all specifications. The measured non-economic resilience capacity shows a detectable global autocorrelation under queen contiguity, whereas a mismatch shows no statistically detectable global autocorrelation under the tested specifications. The primary contribution is methodological: a construct-overlap audit and directional mismatch diagnosis that identifies relative differences between economic development and measured public-service, infrastructure, utility, and ecological resilience capacity. These diagnostics do not establish a causal conversion failure.

DOI

10.3390/su18157637

Rights

© 2026 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

Published Citation

Pang, S., Hou, J., & Yu, D. (2026). Construct Overlap Inflates Apparent Economic-Capacity Alignment: Evidence from a Hebei City Panel, 2014–2023. Sustainability, 18(15), 7637. https://doi.org/10.3390/su18157637

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