ABSTRACT
Rural areas' emergency response capacities are generally weaker when compared to tier one cities and this can have an adverse effect on residents' livelihood and health. Evaluation of rural emergency management is of great significance for improving the rural emergency management capacity. This paper innovatively constructs an evaluation system for the emergency management capabilities with the rural public health emergencies, which includes four dimensions: emergency subject, mechanism, resources and concept. A Projection Pursuit model for objectively processing high-dimensional is constructed, and data from 2010 to 2020 in the rural areas of Xiantao City are selected as samples for empirical research. The results show that: (1) Each dimension of emergency management of public health emergencies contributes more than 20% to the ability. Compared with the other three dimensions, contribution of the emergency concept accounted for the lowest proportion, which was 21.69%, and indicates that this dimension is the key factor restricting the improvement of the emergency management capabilities. (2) From 2010 to 2019, the average annual growth rate of comprehensive emergency management capacity in the rural areas of Xiantao City was 14.9%, and by 2020, the rural emergency management capacity, impacted by the COVID-19 epidemic, grew very rapidly with an annual growth rate of 33.8%. (3) The development of an effective rural emergency management capacity system is not sufficient and unbalanced, which leads to the "barrel effect.” This study can provide theoretical guidelines for the evaluation of rural emergency management capabilities, and provide methodological support for similar research in other regions. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd