| Rapid economic growth since the reform and opening up has guided China's economic aggregate to rank among the top nations.However,economic growth is uneven in different regions of China,but it presents an obvious regional differentiation.Depending on policy and foreign trade dividends,a batch of world-influential urban agglomeration such as the Pearl River Delta,the Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianj in-Hebei Region are formed in the east.Thus the east has stepped on the road that large,medium and small cities develop harmoniously and urban scale distribution is constantly optimized.Economic and social development in the east has been promoted,and an important national economic growth pole has been formed.At the same time,regional development in the central and western regions relatively falls behind.One importance reason is that urbanization development is uneven and development among the large,medium and small cities is inharmonious,which impedes efficient assembling of the elements among the cities,blocks formation of industrial agglomeration and regional space functional specialization,and encumbers regional economic growth.On these bases,the author explores relations between urban scale distribution and regional economic growth,illustrates transmission mechanisms and influence mechanisms of urban scale distribution on regional economic growth both theoretically and empirically,expands the territory of regional economic growth,enriches connotations of regional economic growth,establishes logic relationships between urban scale distribution and regional economic growth,and identifies transmission mechanisms of urban scale distribution and regional economic growth,thereby providing theoretical bases and policy implications for the optimization of urban scale distribution and the coordinated development of regional economy.This paper takes urban scale distribution and regional economic growth as the research objects,abstracts the research topics with historical induction,introduces empirical methodology in modern econometrics and employs logical deduction for deductive reasoning.Firstly,the author constructs a panoramic and theoretical view of urban scale distribution and regional economic growth by combing and summarizing relevant theoretical evolutions and documents,and establishes a theoretical framework for the influence mechanisms of urban scale distribution on regional economic growth from four dimensions(institutional background,political basis,operation mechanism and transmission mechanism)after pointing out deficiencies of existing researches.Secondly,the author starts from historical course of urban scale distribution to macroscopically master the overall development and characteristics of urban scale distribution,and introduces data to completely describe and comb urban scale distribution status and characteristic facts in recent years,thereby obtaining characteristics of urban scale distribution in China.Thirdly,the author conducts an empirical test on the core proposition-urban scale distribution influences regional economic growth.The test takes urban concentration indexes(primate city rate,second city rate,forth city rate and Herfindahl index)as kernel explanatory variables,and utilizes Provincial Panel Data from 1994 to 2015 to examine relations between urban scale distribution and regional economic growth and verify the core proposition of the paper.Thirdly,the author further analyzes the transmission mechanisms from the perspective of space functional specialization,establishes indexes for regional space functional specialization,introduces the interaction terms with urban production concentration to stoichiometric equations and explores concrete effects of urban scale distribution on regional economic growth.Finally,the author combines theoretical analyses with empirical studies and puts forward policy suggestions on the optimization urban scale distribution and the coordinated development of regional economy on this basis.The research results,which contain innovations of the paper,are shown below.(1)Urban scale distribution is the result of urbanization development.The evolution of urban scale distribution models and strengthens its relations with regional cities,thereby influencing regional economic performance and becoming an important restriction factor for economic development.The influence mechanisms of urban scale distribution on regional economic growth are as follows:1.When a primate city has both political and economic advantages,the preference of local governments in resource allocation distorts the relative factor price.Under the influence of home market effects and price index effects,the administrative distortion constantly reinforces element assembling of the primate city and makes the primate city a pump of regional elements,thereby blocking the diffusion and radiation effects of regional economic growth and deteriorating regional economic performance.2.When a political or economic center that is different from the primate city(provincial capital)appears,the two cities are equal in obtaining provincial political resources in terms of the influence.In this case,urban development relies more on free contention.Guided by free contention,factors tend to flow among different industries in different cities in accordance with real marginal revenues and form competition relations between different cities on the basis of factor endowment and comparative advantages,thereby causing regional economic growth.(2)Urban scale distribution affects regional economic growth by influencing space functional specialization of cities,which gradually becomes an important influence mechanism of urban scale distribution on regional economic growth.The logic relationships are as follows:on one hand,when urban sale distribution is single-core,governments impede regional space functional specialization and continuously improve opportunity costs of enterprise and element emigration by virtue of administrative intervention and fiscal subsidy,thereby weakening agglomeration capability of the primate city,causing losses to spatial assembling of elements and enterprises and deteriorating regional economic performance.On the other hand,when urban scale distribution is dual-core or multi-core,cities will form a clear division of functions on the basis of factor endowment and comparative advantages.For example,the central city will undertake high-end responsibilities such as scientific innovation,productive service,financial lease,creative design and management service while peripheral cities will hold mid-low end functions like processing,manufacturing and assembling.Such collaborative agglomeration form is based on the difference in space functional specialization between the service industry and the manufacturing industry.It meets the optimization requirements of element collocation and spatial configuration and promotes optimized development of regional economy.(3)Based on the data of 356 prefecture-level regions in China between 1994 and 2015,the author takes urban concentration indexes as the kernel variables and empirically studies the relations between urban scale distribution and economic growth.The empirical results show:1.Excessively concentrated urban scale distribution is not conductive to regional economic growth,unless the production concentration spreads to two or four cities.2.When regional production activities concentrate in two or four cities,the smaller the difference between primate cities is and the greater the disparity between primate city and other cities is,the more conductive urban scale distribution is to regional economic growth.This means that the primate city should be comparable to primate city in scale and maintain a gap with third and forth cities in dual-core or multi-core urban scale distribution,thereby forming collaboratively developed urban systems that are differential from each other.3.There is a steady inverted U-shaped relationship between the scale of the primate city and regional economic growth.According to the sample regression analysis,production concentration of primate cities in the east(dual-core or multi-core urban scale distribution)reaches an inflection point at about 0.2121 while that in the west(single-core urban scale distribution)reaches the point at 0.3020.(4)Based on the data of 277 prefecture-level cities in China from 1994 to 2015,the author measures regional space functional specialization of 23 provinces and further verifies how urban scale distribution influences regional economic growth with regional space functional specialization.The research results show:1.Single-core urban scale distribution prevents the increase in regional per capita income by inhibiting the optimization of regional space functional specialization while dual-core or multi-core urban scale distribution increases regional per capita income by promoting the optimization of regional space functional specialization.2.The evolution of regional space functional specialization can curb undisciplined growth and oversize of primate cities and drive coordinated development of regional economy. |
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