Enhancing public health emergency management capability is an urgent governance challenge for China’s provinces. To address this, this study develops a theoretical evaluation system comprising four dimensions: prevention and monitoring, emergency processing, emergency response, and recovery and reconstruction. Within this framework, particular attention is paid to measuring each province's capacity for emergency resource reserves and foundational support conditions. To ensure objective indicator weighting, the entropy weighting method is then applied to measure emergency management capabilities across China's 31 provinces over the 12th to 14th Five-Year Plan periods. Finally, the Dagum Gini coefficient and kernel density estimation are used to identify regional disparities and dynamic evolution patterns. Furthermore, this study identifies the factors influencing the enhancement of emergency management capabilities for public health emergencies and investigates their impact. The study found that China’s public health emergency management capability index shows an overall upward trend but with a slow growth rate. Spatially, it exhibits a distribution pattern characterized by higher in the east and lower in the west, higher in the south and lower in the north. Spatial disparities have remained at high levels for an extended period and continue to widen; both inter regional and intraregional differences are prominent, collectively exacerbating the spatial polarization of China’s public health emergency management capabilities. Digital infrastructure and the level of financial development are positively correlated with regional emergency management capabilities for public health emergencies, while local government competition and human capital levels are negatively correlated. The influencing factors of emergency management capabilities also exhibit significant heterogeneity across regions, reflecting differences in infrastructure, talent structure, financial levels, and policy orientations. Strengthening inter-regional coordination and leveraging positive spatial linkages are key pathways to enhancing emergency management capabilities for public health emergencies.
Yuan et al. (Thu,) studied this question.