Regional Agglomerations And Economic Performances In China

With over three decades of reform and opening-up, the rapid and sustainable economic growth of China has stimulated this emerging nation to be one of the world’s bright spots. On the other hand, inequality gap between leading and lagging regions of China has increased by an ever-widening margin each year since then. In this context, regional coordination and sustainable development issues attract much more social attention. Agglomeration economy, formed by inter-regional factor flows, reflects regional economic evolution of both aggregate and structure. Economic performance, noted as "invisible hand" for driving inter-regional factor allocation in new growth theory, which is also the principal standard to judge whether agglomeration economy matched well with local development. This paper combining agglomeration economy and economic performance could broaden traditional perspective, which lead me to think over the following questions:①What is the dynamic nature of agglomeration economy in China since reform and opening-up? What exactly is the economic performance of China? Are there differences between eastern region(leading region) and central/western region(lagging region)?②It is well known that diminishing marginal returns and resource limitation restrain economic growth. Based on the current evolutionary trend, whether economic development of China in future can break up the prophecy that "Diminishing marginal returns from quantity expansion will plunge economic growth into stagnation"?③Harmonizing efficiency and equity is the key issue on drawing up regional development policy, which lead me to take effect of government’s "visible hand" into account, and think about how to reduce inequality degree for regional coordination?My main motivation for this dissertation is a desire to investigate the above questions. In this paper, I start from the inherent linkage between agglomeration economy and growth performance, and then analyze regional development from a broader perspective, which is based on both logic deduction method and empirical induction method. This dissertation is divided into six parts. The main contents and findings are as follows:Chapter one is introduction, mainly explains the background, motives, study approaches, structure and contributions.Chapter two surveys three ranges of literatures:the theoretical and empirical studies about spatial agglomeration; about regional trajectories of economic development and structural evolution; to make tracks for theoretical frontier, sums up literatures of "New Economic Geography".Chapter three develops theoretical models to explore agglomeration, economic efficiency and sustainable development. Based on derivations to proclaim some mechanisms and laws of what influence entrepreneurs’ selection? How is the evolving linkage between spatial agglomeration and total factor productivity(TFP)? Whether sustainable development is an achievable aim under resource restriction?Chapter four describes the spatial agglomeration pattern of economic activities in China and then investigates the causes of agglomeration, which provide evidences for the theoretical expectations of Chapter three and also for the classical theories such as Marshall principle. From comprehensive angle of view, this paper checks inner-industrial, inter-industrial and joint effects based on a typical transitional economy sample spanning three decades, which has been a complete void on the current synthetically empirical study. The main finding shows that simple inner-industrial agglomeration pattern is unsustainable since new century, on the other hand, joint effects between specialization and diversity would promote local development.Chapter five discusses growth performances and development patterns between leading and lagging regions of China. The main finding shows that both technological progress and comprehensive efficiency have declined when compared to eastern area since1990s, which induce formation and disparity of "growth pole" in eastern area and "subsidence area" in middle/western area. After constructing the input and output panel data of provinces in China from1980to2008, it estimates both quality improvement and quantity expansion of economic growth in different areas. The finding shows that growth effect plays as the first driving force in eastern area, After further investigating, it also finds that input redundance in "subsidence area" has cause dynamic unefficiency, meanwhile, energy consumption has contributed much less to economic growth in eastern area in21th century, which demonstrates the growth pattern change. After investigating "visible hand effect" of government, it also finds that scale economy and concentration are both cause and effect in middle area, and has certain implications for how to make preferential policies for regional coordinated development.Chapter six concludes this dissertation and points out some proposals.To sum up, compared with literatures available, the innovations of this dissertation are summarized as follows:Firstly, this paper quests for how to achieve regional coordination and sustainable development of China, based on a new analysis framework which combines both agglomeration economy and growth performance perspectives. Secondly, this paper constructs a more systemic analysis framework in the theoretical content, including spatial evolution, inherent linkage between regional agglomeration and efficiency, and sustainable development under resource constriction. Thirdly, this paper investigates the inherent linkage between agglomeration economy and growth performance based on both logic deduction method and empirical induction method, which could deepen the understanding of inherent law of regional development. Thirdly, the main findings of this paper would enrich regional economic theory, which also provide objective evidences for the regional policy-making.