| Since Chinese government implemented the reform and opening-up policy,China’s economy has made remarkable achievements.However,the accompanying regional contradiction is becoming an increasingly important issue.Aiming at solving the unbalanced and uncoordinated economic development among different areas in China,the report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China(CPC)first proposed the regional coordinated development strategy,which is a key improvement of China’s regional development strategy after the reforming and opening-up.An important method to settle the unbalanced regional development is implementing the place-based policy.In China,development zone is both a typical example of place-based policy and a distinct characteristic during China’s fast development period.At the same time,the report at 19 th CPC National Congress also pointed out that China’s economy had transformed form high growth stage to high-quality development one.Obviously,because firms are microcosmic bases of high-quality development,improving productivity of firms is a fundamental way to realize high-quality economic development.Under this background,this paper uses firms’ total factor productivity to measure the economic effectiveness of development zone and comprehensively analyses the productivity effect of development zone in Beijing,Tianjin and Hebei.I hope this study can provide references for development zone construction,economic development in cities and regional coordinated development in China.This paper uses Python to get address coordinates of above-scale industrial enterprises in China and Javascript to invoke connector of Baidu map API to reproduce development zone on Baidu map.Combining this two data sources,we can recognize which firm is located in the development zone and calculate the distance between a firm and its nearest development zone’s border.With the improvement in date quality,this paper breaks through the restriction of data limitation faced by other’s researches before,and carries on empirical research according to the procedure from productivity effect identification,mechanism analysis to heterogeneity analysis.In addition,referring to the research approach of spatial economics,we probe into the issue of geographical position of development zone.In the light of the “winners and losers” recognization strategy raised by Greenstone etc(2010),this paper applies difference-in-difference model for identifying development zone’s productivity effect and finds that setting up a development zone will increase the productivity of firms in the zone.However,productivity effect does not immediately show up the moment a development zone is established.This conclusion strengthens the point that industrial agglomeration and selection effect play an important role in the sustainable economicdevelopment of the zones.From the view of spatial economics,the regression analysis based on the border effect development zone comes to the same conclusion.More over,using the number of villages in the same town as instrumental variable for development zone dummy variable,2SLS regression analysis indicates that the outcome above is robust and the zones’ location choice do not reflect preference for areas which have great potential for future economic growth.In terms of mechanism analysis of development zone’s productivity advantage,we adopt the linear interpolation method developed by Combes etc(2012)to distinguish industrial agglomeration form selection effect,and find that the productivity advantage of development zone primarily comes form industrial agglomeration and selection effect also works by eliminating low productivity firms in the zone.What’s more,high productivity firms benefits more than low productivity ones from industrial agglomeration.To move forward a single step,we discover that a zone’ productivity effect is influence by its leading industry and the feature of both zone and firm.At last,this paper futher explores the spatial externality of development zone policy and discovers that firms near the zone under the impact of both positive spillover effect and negative resource deprivation effect,which result in an U-shape productivity distribution of these firms,that is,with the distance between firms and the nearest development zone’s border extending,the productivity of firms around first decrease and then increase.However,in a wider area,development zone’s positive spillover effect dominates and plays a persistent and prominent role in enhancing the productivity of firms nearby.As a whole,development zone is not a solitary islet,on the contrary,it accelerates the cities economic gowth by its own prosperity.The topic of this paper is an important issue of China’s regional development strategy.Although we only discuss the example of development zones in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region,the conclusions we draw provide valuable references for development zone construction,economic zone division in cities,improvement of firm’s productivity and coordinated development of regions.The full text sticks tightly to the spirits of official documents of the central leadership,and highlights the distinct themes of both coordinated regional development and high-quality economic growth.The government had better provide a fair policy and production environment for firms to help them improve productivity.When choosing the development zone location and setting zone’s leading industry,relevant departments should consider how to cultivate zone’s industrial agglomeration and avoid the industrial structure among development zones being highly similar.In addition,seeking effective way to restrain development zone’s negative resource deprivation effect,taking full advantage of zone’s positive spillover effect,ccelerating city economic gowth by development zone construction are all practical issues the government should consider.This paper uses data mining technology to obtain relative location and spacing distance between firms and development zones,and brings new analytical tool for traditional place-based policy research,which,to some extent,breaks through data limitation faced by previous study and makes more reliable and comprehensive research possible.The method of data collection and data processing or regression analysis technique we use are transplantable,and their application prospects are beyond this paper’s research domains. |
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