Research On The Industrial Agglomeration Effect Of China Development Zones

As the window of China's opening up and the main base of attracting investment,the development zones have made important contributions to the rapid growth of China's economy.However,with the gradual disappearance of the "demographic dividend",relying on factors input such as capital investment to promote economic growth will not be sustainable.China's economy has changed from the rapid growth stage into medium-high speed growth stage,economic growth model must be changed from the past mainly relying on capital and other factor inputs to rely on total factor productivity increase.In this context,the development zones must transform and upgrade from the past mainly through attracting investment to promote economic growth to promote economic growth through industrial agglomeration effects to improve firm productivity.However,as the most intensive areas of China's manufacturing firms,whether the development zones have agglomeration effects,the existing researches have been controversial and not given a unified conclusion,moreover,these studies do not consider that the development zones may exist selection effect,research the agglomeration effect of the development zones must solve the endogenous effect caused by the selection effect.Based on this,this paper takes the state-level economic and technological development zones and the high-tech development zones as the research object,in the case of considering the selection effect of the development zones,and makes a deep research on the agglomeration effect and its origin of the development zones.This paper consists of seven chapters,mainly to answer the following three questions:why to study the agglomeration effect of the development zones,how to distinguish the agglomeration effect and how to improve the agglomeration effect of the development zones.The main contents of each chapter are as follows:the first chapter is the introduction,which mainly introduces the research background,research significance,research framework,research content,and the main innovation points of this paper.The second chapter is the concept definition and literature review,which mainly define the basic concepts of the development zones,the industrial agglomeration effect and the selection effect,and sort out the relevant research of the agglomeration effect,industrial agglomeration formation and development zones in detailed.The third chapter is historical evolution and performance of the development zones,respectively introducing the development process and the development status of the state-level economic and technological development zones and high-tech development zones,and using macro data to compare the performance of the state-level economic and technological development zones and high-tech development zones firms with national industrial firms and national high-tech firms.The fourth chapter is distinguishing the agglomeration effect of the development zones:Theory and methods.This chapter points out that the development zones may exist selection effect in theory.And distinguishing the agglomeration effect of the development zones must solve the endogenous effect caused by the selection effect,also points out the different influence of agglomeration effect and selection effect on firm productivity distribution,and thus the distinguishing method of agglomeration effect and selection effect of the development zones.Chapter five is distinguishing the agglomeration effect of the development zones:empirical research,this chapter uses a large-scale firms data of nationwide development zones to distinguish the agglomeration effect and selection effect of the development zones and empirically test the influence of the preferential tax policies and financial subsidies preferential policies of the development zones on selection effect.The sixth chapter is the research on the cause of agglomeration effect in the development zones.This chapter divides industrial agglomeration into intra-industrial agglomeration based on four digit industry specialization agglomeration,related-industry co-agglomeration based on two digit industry specialization agglomeration and diversified agglomeration,to research the influence of intra-industrial agglomeration,related-industry co-agglomeration,diversified agglomeration and characteristics of the development zones and the cities where the development zones are located on agglomeration effect of the development zones.The seventh chapter is the conclusions and policy recommendations.This chapter summarizes the main conclusions of the paper,and puts forward the policy recommendations to improve the agglomeration effect of the development zones.The conclusion of this paper mainly includes the following four aspects:First,characteristics of the development zones firms are significantly different in nondevelopment zone firms,the performance of firms in the development zones is significantly higher than that of non-development zone firms,and the development zones have a high degree of industrial concentration.Second,there is significant industrial agglomeration effect in the development zones,the agglomeration effect of the development zones mainly come from intra-industrial agglomeration,rather than related-industry co-agglomeration and diversified agglomeration,the agglomeration effect of the development zones are mainly reflected as intermediate goods input sharing effect,while specialized labor market pooling effect and knowledge spillover effect has little effect on the agglomeration effect.This also shows though the development zones have formed a certain industry agglomeration effect,which,however,is mainly formed by building industry chain to form scale economy effect and reducing intermediate product cost.Due to the development zones have not formed a strong specialized labor market pooling effect and knowledge spillover effect,industrial agglomeration is limited to improve the firms technology and innovation level of the development zones.Third,the development zones have a significant negative selection effect,which shows that the development zones attract and hold a considerable proportion of low productivity firms,which affect long-term sustainable development of the development zones.As for preferential policies in the development zones,it is a financial subsidy policy,rather than tax incentive policy that results in the negative selection effects of the development zones.Fourth,in the characteristics of the development zones and the cities where the development zones are located,integration of production and city can not promote the productivity growth of firms in the development zones,infrastructure and foreign direct investment of the cities in which the development zones are located can promote productivity growth of firms,but science and education resources of the cities can not promote productivity growth of firms.The innovations of this paper are mainly embodied in two aspects:the innovation of research perspective and the innovation on data.The innovation of research perspective mainly reflected that the selection effect is introduced into the research of the agglomeration effect of the development zones,the development zones may have positive selection effect,may also have negative selection effect.Positive selection effect makes previous studies overestimate the agglomeration effect of the development zones,and negative selection effect makes the previous studies underestimate the agglomeration effect of the development zones,distinguishing the agglomeration effect of the development zones must solve the endogenous effect caused by the selection effect.The innovation on data is mainly embodied in:in this paper,we use the large-scale firms data of nationwide state-level economic and technological development zones and high-tech development zones,which not only overcome the limitations of the representation of survey data of small scale firms,but also overcome the problem that using macro data cannot distinguish agglomeration effect and selection effect.