The Research On The Influence Of Industrial Agglomeration On Regional Income Gap

Though China's economy has been rapidly grown in the past four decades since the reform and opening up,the regional income disparities are becoming larger.The combination of international industrial capital and domestic cheap labour force led to a “marvelous growth” in the coastal areas of east China while relatively lagged in the areas of middle and west China.The development problems of regional inequilibrium are salient,thus the solution to the problems of regional income gap has been the focus for the government and the academia.At the same time,there are two basic characteristics significantly appearing in the modern economic development: the sustainability of economic growth and the concentration of spatial distribution in the economic activities.Industrial agglomeration is an important characteristic as well as a powerful carrier of economic spatial distribution and a crucial engine to reduce regional income gap and to sustain economic growth.To investigate the problems of regional income gap through the perspective of industrial agglomeration is a potent way to realize the regional coordinated development with the dimensions of industrial transfer and undertaking.Therefore,based on the research framework of New Economic Geography,this paper studies the income gap in China from the perspective of industrial agglomeration,we further explore the influential mechanism and the effect of industrial agglomeration on regional income gap,then in the empirical analysis,we use the provincial panel data of China from 2003 to 2017 to testify the effect of industrial agglomeration on regional income gap,on regional heterogeneity and on effort mechanism.We expect that this paper can provide the useful thinking and policy suggestions for the reduction of regional income gap and strategic implementation of regional coordinated development from the perspective of industrial spatial distribution.The marginal contribution of this paper mainly focuses on the theoretical level and empirical perspective.At the theoretical level,this paper,based on the New Economic Geography theory,firstly discusses the efforts mechanism of industrial agglomeration on the regional income gap,then relaxes the assumptions of the Single Factor Flow Model and constructs the Labour-capital Factor Free Flow Model on the basis of abandoning the agricultural sector by which we try to deduce the theoretical model to explore the industrial agglomeration and regional income gap from the factor market.At the empirical level,this paper focus on the non-linear efforts of manufacturing industry agglomeration on the regional income gap which highlights the influence of industrial transfer in the core districts and that of industrial undertaking in the remoted places on reducing the regional income gap.Considering the periodically dynamic changes of industrial agglomeration,the trend of industrial reagglomeration will be further developed and be led by the high-tech industries and the production-oriented service ones.Therefore,this paper takes the efforts of industrial reagglomeration on the regional income gap into consideration so as to emphasizes the features about dynamic changes of the industrial spatial distribution.The results of this paper indicate that:(1)The influence of industrial agglomeration on the regional income gap shows significant stage characteristics.At the early period,the effort of industrial agglomeration easily enlarges the regional income gap and then it will reduce the regional income gap.Meanwhile in the process of the industrial agglomeration,the scale of local market will lead to heterogenization on the regional income gap and to intensify the dynamic changes of it.(2)China currently exist obvious regional and provincial income gap while the industrial agglomeration is mainly concentrated in the eastern coastal region,the middle region has a comparative advantage,but the extent of industrial agglomeration in the western region is lower.Such distribution from the coast to the inland region basically depicts the feature of the changes in steps.(3)The empirical results show that there is a significant inverted U-shaped relationship between the industrial agglomeration and the regional income gap whose inflection point is 1.149,and majority of the regions are on the left side of the turning point.The means that the development of industrial agglomeration will still enlarge the regional income gap;the relationship between the industrial agglomeration and the regional income gap has regional heterogeneity;the turning point in coastal region is higher than that in inland region.(4)Though the industrial re-agglomeration in certain extent will enlarge regional income gap,the guidance of local authorities with regional heterogeneity are helpful to restrain the negative efforts of it.(5)Both industrial agglomeration and re-agglomeration can narrow the income gap between the middle-and-western and eastern regions,but continually widen the gap between the middle and western regions.The industrial diffusion in the eastern region promotes the middle region being the priority place to undertake the industries,but the western region does not have the advantages to accept the industrial undertaking and agglomeration,otherwise the income gap will further be widen.(6)The difference of market size in the process of industrial agglomeration development is an important way to affect the regional income gap and which exists stage heterogeneity.At the left side of the turning point,the local market size will expand the regional income gap which called “Amplification Effect”.At the right of the turning point,the local market size will result in “Reverse Local Market Effect” by which the regional income gap can be reduced.From the conclusion of this paper,the key point to narrow the income gap is to continually adhere to the path of regional coordinated development and to intensify the regional cooperation.The local authorities should abandon the ideological restraints that purely pursue the maximum profit for themselves but pursue the cooperation and reciprocity instead of zero-sum game preventing from the unreasonable competition represented by the industrial isomorphism.Each of the regions should fully use of its own advantageous resources;plan its functional positioning;clarify the industrial division and optimize the industrial layout.In accordance with realization of the industrial effective diffusion in the advanced regions and the efficient undertaking in the backward regions,we need to further promote the cluster development of the advantageous industries with our own characteristics.Moreover,on the basis of the full development of industrial agglomeration,the re-agglomeration development mode represented by the service industries with high-tech,informatization and productivity is actively sought to propel economic growth and to reduce the regional income gap.