Research On The Spatial Effect Of Information And Communication Infrastructure

Since the economic society had entered into the information age,the GDP proportion of information economic and integrated information economic had increased year by year,and the contribution to GDP growth had increased as well.Under such a practical background,the effect of ICT on regional economy has drawn extensive attention from domestic and foreign scholars.Scholars holding the viewpoint of ‘technological determinism’ regard ICT as a principal factor leading to social change,even an exclusive determinant factor.Under such theoretical background,some scholars believe the development and application of ICT should rid economic activities of space limitation,and present a thesis of ‘death of distance’.In the contrary,other scholars believe the application of ICT has strengthened the competitive advantages of central position in the social network.Because ICT has reduced transportation and time costs to a large extent,ICT has promoted agglomeration in economic activities and economic value,and then bring on ‘digital divide’.Besides,there are also some scholars think the effect of information and communication infrastructure on economic activities’ spatial evolution is not significant.Therefore,study on spatial effect of information and communication infrastructure has practical significance and research value.In fact,the spatial effect of information and communication infrastructure on regional economic might vary with different economic foundation.In that case,what is the spatial effect of information and communication infrastructure in China? At the present stage,domestic studies on spatial effect of ICT are mainly theoretical research,quantitative examinations are relative less.In view of this,this study took Chinese cities as regional research unit,systematically studied the effect of ICT onurban spatial structure,industry clusters,urban interaction with theory and empirical study,and aimed to enrich researches on ICT effects at regional level.This study can be summarized in the following aspects: Firstly,based on relevant theories,this paper constructed an analytical framework,began with the spatial evolution mechanism analysis of economic activities during the information era,then,analyzed in detail the effect of information and communication infrastructure on residential location,industrial location and urban interaction at the theoretical level.Secondly,this paper presented the development situation and spatial distribution feature of ICT in China,and analyzed the regional disparity of informatization level.Thirdly,on the basis of relevant theoretical model,this paper used Zipf law to appraise urban spatial structure at provincial level and four major economic zones in China;then use results of Zipf coefficient and related data set to conduct an empirical study on the effect of information and communication infrastructure on urban spatial structure.Fourthly,based on the relevant mechanism analysis,this paper use measure results of spatial Gini coefficient and related data set to conduct empirical studies on the effect of ICT on service industry cluster and manufacturing industry cluster at city level and provincial level in China.Finally,by using related data set and spatial weighted matrix,the spillover effects of information and communication infrastructure are measured in accordance with the spatial econometric model.In addition,this paper measured geographical scope of information and communication infrastructure’s spillover by establishing different spatial weighted matrices.The conclusion of this study can be summarized as the following aspects according to the theoretical and empirical results:Firstly,in general the application of information and communication infrastructure reduces information exchange cost and economic value delivery cost largely,but the virtual network can not completely replace the ‘face to face’communication,the spatial evolution of economic activities still obeys Tobler’s first law of geography.In addition,this research considers that application of ICT hadstrengthened the competitive advantages of central cities in society network according to the theoretical and empirical results.Therefore,the thesis of ‘death of distance’ is not set up in China.Secondly,application of ICT had promoted the agglomeration of provincial urban spatial structure in China.In the contrary,application of ICT had promoted the decentralization of urban spatial structure in Chinese four major economic zones.According to the Zipf coefficient,it is observed that provincial urban structures are too disperse,thus application of ICT will benefit the development of hierarchical urban system in China.Thirdly,it can be observed that agglomeration degrees of service industry at provincial level and city level are relatively low in China according to the spatial Gini coefficient measure results.Application of ICT had further reduced the provincial agglomeration degree of service industry.At city level,there are regional differences about effects of information and communication infrastructure on industry cluster,which is information and communication infrastructure had made greater contribution to industry cluster in the eastern area and the middle area of China.Finally,the application of ICT,especially mobile communication technology and internet technology had contributed to the urban economic growth and had improved employment situation.In addition,the spillover effect of information and communication infrastructure is also significant with regional difference.information and communication infrastructure had extended the scope of spillover effect,but it is still limited by geographical distance.