Study On The Relationship Between Infrastructure Investment, Urban-rural Income Gap And Urbanization

China’s reform and opening up was thirty-six years, the miracle of average annual growth rate more than 10%, and China achieve rapid economic recovery after the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis, is not only closely related to the market economy brought about by the favorable external environment, the basis for continuous improvement infrastructure facilities and investment decisions made by the Chinese government also plays an irreplaceable role. In the 21 st century, the full development concept has gradually replace single growth targets of economic efficiency, equity is increasingly attracting attention of the community. For a long time, infrastructure investment is more focused on economic efficiency, at this stage, relying on consumption and exports to ensure economic growth to maintain a high growth rate with a larger limit, still need to maintain a certain amount of incremental infrastructure investment to maintain steady growth pattern. In this context, How to balance efficiency and equity in the investment decision-making such as the number of scale and investment distribution in order to achieve balanced regional development and long-term sustainable development, is major practical issue placed in front of the government and academia.Carding infrastructure investments historical context found that, for the larger unbalanced regional development formed by China early non-balanced development strategy, and urban-rural economic structure led to urban-rural income gap remain high for a long time, the Chinese government take infrastructure investment as important policy measures for the balanced regional economic development, but also the core bond for the linkage between urban and rural development. Based on China’s national conditions, infrastructure investments impact on the income distribution and population distribution pattern between urban and rural by acting on the urban and rural development, thus relates to infrastructure investment fair discussion. As key government decision-making tools and control means, how to serve the overall development but balance between efficiency and equity, is an urgent need to establish and improve of the framework for the equity discussion of infrastructure investment.In order to clarify the complex relationship among infrastructure investment and urban-rural income gap and urbanization in equity perspective, in this paper, inspired by the classical theory model, by introducing infrastructure investment into the urban and rural two-sector model, and gradually build a theoretical model of the relationship among infrastructure investment, the urban-rural income gap and urbanization. In empirical analysis, problem-oriented and careful selection applicability measurement methods, further provide the channel and sound empirical evidence for the relationship among infrastructure investment and the urban-rural income gap and urbanization.Compared with the existing literature, the main innovation of our work include:①The previous studies have emphasized the empirical research on relationship between infrastructure investment and income inequality, lack the necessary theoretical support, and study limitation about emphasis on rural but urban ignored, in response to these problems, our study using the macro output as a bridge as well as studying the income decided equation, to construct the theoretical mechanism of infrastructure investments impact on the urban-rural income gap by affected urban and rural residents’ income respectively, the empirical analysis focused on capture localized information of infrastructure investments on urban and rural residents’ incomes, test the income crowding effect formed by incremental expansion of infrastructure and regional inequality.The results show that: it can be judged that the increase in infrastructure investment and regional inequality lead to income crowding out effect, which exacerbates the urban-rural income gap; about regional differences, investment helps to alleviate the urban-rural income gap in eastern region, but has opposite effect in central and western regions; infrastructure investment is endogenous to economic growth, which aggravates the deterioration of urban-rural income gap through channel effect of investment and implementation of economic growth, while the level of urbanization plays a restraining role.②Lewis’ dual economic model stressed that, the urban-rural income gap is the most important factor in the migration behavior of farmers, which can be based on the theory of relationship between infrastructure investments and the urban-rural income gap to build a theoretical model between urbanization and infrastructure investment, to make up for insufficient heoretical and empirical research on relationship between infrastructure investment and urbanization in existing literature. Under the China’s real background about imbalance between urban and rural areas, to build a theoretical model of relationship between infrastructure and urbanization, by the regional differences in effects of infrastructure investment on urbanization, given the empirical evidence for infrastructure and urbanization has not yet virtuous linkage, infrastructure investment with public expenditure and urban-rural income gap constitutes a fair discussion of urbanization. Among them, the empirical analysis using quantile regression and threshold effect regression methods to identify regional differences characteristics of infrastructure impact on urbanization, while using instrumental variables approach to deal with endogeneity, comprehensive to providing a robustness test between them. The result show that:urbanization effect of infrastructure exists geographical space distributed characteristics, the marginal utility of the infrastructure is significantly different in areas with different urbanization; infrastructure and urbanization is difficult to achieve positive linkage as urbanization is lagging behind; infrastructure investment, public spending levels and the income gap between urban and rural areas constitute core determinants of urbanization, to achieve linkage between urbanization and infrastructure needed to improve the ability of public spending and reduce the income gap.③Rely on urban growth to promote economic development is considered to be the most important means at the present stage of China balance between efficiency and equity, but the existing research is not clear on gains and losses discussion about the current development means at efficiency and equity. In this paper, under the background of China regional economic growth and urbanization disorders, to build consistency test model of infrastructure investment and growth effects, and in obtaining temporal local information about economic efficiency of infrastructure investment, examine the influence of infrastructure investment efficiency on urbanization, the overall provision of infrastructure investment perspectives for economic growth logical path of development and urbanization correction. Overall provides a logical for economic growth and urbanization development path Correction in the perspective of infrastructure investment. Among them, the use of geographic weighting regress(GWR) and space-time-weighted regress(GTWR) method to get time and space differentiated information efficiency of economic growth, based it to presented consistency index(CR) concept, characterize the efficiency of infrastructure investment decisions from the perspective of economic growth effects. The results found that:the matching degree of infrastructure investment efficiency and scale under the constraint of regional economic growth target showed significant differences in spatial and temporal scale, the imbalance in the efficiency of investment and scale of infrastructure investment leads to the effect of urbanization blocked; Take 2003 as the turning point,intervals threshold characterize the degree of matching reflects the shift trend of consistency to deviation. The pattern of investment promote coordination of regional economic growth and urbanization is broken, efficiency of investment and scale expand is not appropriate.