| City is the main space carrier of modern economy. China’s urbanization provides an opportunity to explore the rules of the development of the city. This paper studies the appropriate size of cities from the perspective of productivity and individual marring probability, and analyzes the effects of baised fiscal policy on city size and resident welfare in China.Economic theories can’t give clear answer to the impacts of city size on the productivity, so existing empirical literatures study this problem. The empirical research that put the one degree term of city size as the core explanatory variable drew a conclusion that the expansion of city had positive effect on the productivity, whereas other research that added the square of city size found the optimal city size. The empirical model that set a specific function form may hide the true relationship between city size and productivity. This paper uses the data of 285 cities at the prefecture level and above during the period of 2003-2012 in China, and the partially linear panel data model with fixed effects to estimate the relationship between city size and productivity. The results show, before city size reaches 1.1 million, the expansion of city had positive effect on the productivity, after this there is no significant difference among different city sizes, the expansion of the big cities does not improve productivity.The improvement of residents’quality of life is the main goal of the urbanization in next stage in China, however, marriage difficulties of marriageable-age youths have become increasingly prominent. Based on the theoretical analysis of urban economics and marriage economics, this paper proposes three yet-to-be-tested theoretical hypotheses: ①in bigger cities, the married probability of marriageable youth are smaller in urban China, ②influences of the city size on the probability of marriage for men and women are asymmetry in urban China,③influences of the city size on the probability of marriage for marriageable youth are time-variant in urban China. Using micro urban residents survey data to empirically test above hypotheses, the results show that:the city size increases by 1%, the married probability of China’s marriageable youth fall by 0.105%, and this means that doubling the city size, the married probability of marriageable youth fall by 10.5%; the city size increases by 1%, the married probability of marriageable women fall by 0.098%, and that the married probability of marriageable men fall by 0.146%;Influences of the city size on the probability of marriage for china’s urban marriageable youth have an obvious tendency to increase with time.The spatial distribution of population and production not only relies on market forces, are also associated with the government’s behavior. The influences of government policies on city size should not be ignored. Under normal circumstances, the larger the city the higher the administrative level, which makes the public resources to concentrate in high administrative cities, thus the fiscal expenditure is partial to big cities. Learning from the framework of New Economic Geography, this paper studies the influence of the biased fiscal policy on spatial distribution of population and production. The numerical simulation results show that the biased fiscal policy is the important reason for the increasing expansion of big cities, and it reduces the welfare of residents in China.In short, the expansion of big cities does not improve productivity, on the contrary it makes marriage difficulties of marriageable-age youths in big cities become increasingly prominent. The biased fiscal policy contributes to the increasing expansion of big cities and reduces the welfare of residents. Coordinating the distribution of fiscal spending among cities can effectively prevent the excessive expansion of big cities and realize a reasonable layout of the urbanization in China. |
