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The Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) is the most prominent urban agglomeration in China, with plans for further development. Using the regional collaboration theoretical framework for assessing urban comprehensive carrying capacity (UCC), the improved entropy method is applied to establish an index system based on a social, economic, environment, and transportation perspective to compare UCCs of the GBA's 11 cities for 2000–2016. Results show that the social subsystem is central to the evaluation system. Cities' performances vary significantly, with six becoming overloaded in 2016 and the other five remaining loadable. Guangzhou performed best, with a rising UCC; Shenzhen rebounded after a long period of decline; Hong Kong's capacity rose slightly, with some fluctuation; and Macao performed worse and continues to slide, with no signs of improvement. Overall, the UCC of the urban agglomeration showed a downward trend, with only a few cities continuing to improve. The spatial distribution for UCC was high in the north and low in the south, showing scope for improvement. The study enriches regional collaboration theory and proposes policy implications for GBA development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most previous studies on comprehensive urban carrying capacity (UCC) have estimated UCC levels and comparatively analyzed the heterogeneity of the sample cities. Very few researchers have focused on the interaction effects between different categories of UCC based on synergetic theory. To fill this gap, we constructed a panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) model to study 11 cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area from 2000 to 2016. The ultimate goal of this study is to improve comprehensive UCC levels by forming a virtuous circle of mutual reinforcement between the four types of carrying capacity. To do so, the interaction mechanisms of the four subsystems are examined. Results show that (a) only transportation and social carrying capacity had causality between them as per the Granger causality test; (b) all four carrying capacities can support themselves (i.e., the development of economic conditions helps to improve social carrying capacity and the improvement of social carrying capacity helps to improve environmental carrying capacity); and (c) both the four carrying capacities are mostly affected by their own fluctuations. Overall transportation carrying capacity is the most important driving force among the four subsystems that interact with each other; followed by economic carrying capacity, which has promotion effect on the social and environmental aspects; social carrying capacity poses impact on the environmental dimension but not vice versa. Policy suggestions and future research directions are highlighted in the final section. • The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area is examined for 2000–2016. • The mean squared deviation and panel vector autoregressive methods are employed. • Transportation carrying capacity is the most significant driving force. • Economic carrying capacity could impact on social and environmental counterparts. • Social carrying capacity impact on environmental dimension but not the opposite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]