City-Level Socioeconomic Indicators and Composite Development Index for China, 2000-2021

This dataset represents the first comprehensive, long-term, multi-indicator city-scale socioeconomic dataset for China, of great significance for urban socioeconomic research, regional inequality analysis, and monitoring Sustainable Development Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities).

In the current release (v1.0), we provide a 22-year (2000–2021) panel of 35 relative socioeconomic indicators for 366 cities in China, with missing values imputed through the fusion of a Bayesian spatiotemporal interacting varying intercepts (BSTIVI) model and multi-source satellite remote sensing data. This approach achieves excellent goodness-of-fit and predictive accuracy while preserving spatial continuity and temporal consistency. Each imputed value is accompanied by narrow (50%) and wide (95%) Bayesian credible intervals to quantify prediction uncertainty. A city-level composite socioeconomic development index is constructed annually using the entropy weight method, accompanied by Gini coefficients and hotspot analysis results for spatiotemporal inequality assessment.

Data files:

• 2000-2021 Chinese_city-level_socioeconomic dataset_35indicators&credible intervals_V2.0.csv: Complete set of 35 socio-economic relative indicators with Bayesian credible intervals (both wide and narrow).
• 2000-2021 Chinese_city-level_socioeconomic dataset_35indicators&credible intervals_Metadata.csv: Detailed names of each socioeconomic indicator as used in the manuscript, along with descriptions and notes.
• 2000-2021 Chinese_city-level_composite index.csv: Annual composite index of Chinese cities.

The dataset is provided in CSV format to facilitate reproducibility and secondary analysis.