Abstract: As crucial gateways to global market, ports play a radiating and exemplary role in regional growth. This paper explores the spatial effects of port development on regional economic openness for a sample of 43 cities located in Bohai Rim region. We measure the opening level of cities through 8 indicators via G1-Entropy method from the perspective of economic base and the degree of opening, then use spatial correlation test to demonstrate spatial dependence and heterogeneity among cities. Based on the above result, we utilize one-regime spatial Durbin model to investigate the direct and indirect effect of port development on economic openness and two-regime spatial Durbin model to take the gradient of openness spillover into consideration. This paper is featured with three innovative points:Firstly, the analysis of spatial spillover effect of port development on economic openness enriches the current port-city relation research; secondly, the discussion of spatial dependence and spillover overcomes the disadvantage of isolating the research object geographically; thirdly, the application of two-regime spatial Durbin model explains the difference of spillover effect. Results suggest that economic openness is influenced by both local and neighboring ports. Furthermore, the spatial spillover effects are significant among 43 cities. We also find that the overall openness spillover effect of Bohai Rim falls into the mutual benefit development type while Liaoning province belongs to independency type, and role model type for Shandong province. Hebei-Tianjin subgroup falls into the type featured by being the weak when encountering the strong, and being the strong when encountering the weak.

Key words: port development, economic openness, spatial spillover effect, two-regime spatial Durbin model