Land Policy Of Development Zones,Industrial Agglomeration And Innovation And Regional Economic Development

Development zones are not only a successful location-oriented policy practice since Chinese reform and opening up,but also an important implement for China to promote urbanization and reconstruct urban space.During Chinese economic development,development zones also play an important role in this process as locational growth poles.However,development zones are facing an external pressure of innovation transformation and an internal pressure of land scarcity nowadays.Therefore,it is of great practice to study how to maximize the value of land policy of development zones under the condition of limited land supply,in order to realize the transformation and sustainable development of development zones.This problem also becomes a focus of Chinese economic growth and urban development among different branches of economics study.In this context,this paper starting from the perspective of development zones’ land policy,constructs a theoretical framework of how land policy effect industry agglomeration and innovation,and then influence the regional economy.Besides,this paper takes the possibility of development zones’ upgrade into consideration,following the research path from internal to external,which also enriches the theoretical and empirical research of how preferential policy effect regional economic development,and provide a quantitative support for Chinese location-oriented policy making in future.First of all,this paper makes a preliminary analysis based on several concepts and the overall situation of development zones,policy rents and leading industries,including the three different stages and the classification of development zones,policy rent supplied by land preferential policy and other kinds of preferential policy,and the leading industries situation in development zones.The descriptive analysis shows that the development zones in China are generally well developed,and leading industries related to the zone planning have been basically formed,while development zones also face the requirement of transforming to an innovative development mode with the weakening of policy’s effectiveness.Secondly,this paper determines the effect and advantage of land policies for investment promotion in development zones,and a theoretical mechanism of how land policy guides the formation of leading industries,then promotes the innovation levels and regional economy is established from the perspective of land preferential policy and zone planning orientation.After that,this paper also establishes a corresponding mathematical model and proposes 6 hypotheses that can be empirically tested.Finally,this paper conducts several empirical tests,which take the upgrade time of national development zones into the analysis,and uses a combination of methods containing data mining,difference-in-difference analysis(DID),difference-indifference-in-difference analysis(DDD),text mining,fixed-effect analysis,and successive mediation analysis to test the 6 hypotheses mentioned above.Three parts of empirical tests mainly analyze the land policy within the development zones and its influence on the regional economy,the transmission from the land policy to the agglomeration of leading industry and innovation,and how innovation influences the regional economy.The samples used contain Chinese Development Zones data,land transaction data,Chinese patent data,innovation cluster data,Chinese city data,and125 districts and counties data.The results indicate that:(1)The establishment of development zones could significantly affect the land transaction in terms of land price,land area and transaction method,which promote the development of the regional economy;(2)Zone planning would produce a selection effect,which has a direct impact on the forming leading industries.The agglomeration of leading industries is conducive to improving the quantity and quality level of innovation,and the change of innovation is heterogeneity in the internal and external;(3)The change of regional innovation level has an indirect effect on the regional economy,and this impact also shows different among different establishment duration.It shows the improvement of innovation quality is the driving force of the regional economy.The innovations of this paper are as follows.First,this paper constructs a theoretical framework and mathematical models of how development zones promote industrial agglomeration and innovation,thereby promoting the regional economy.Secondly,this paper takes the land policy of development zones as the main research perspective and pays more attention to the agglomeration of leading industries in the development zones,which deeply explores the influence of the preferential policy and zone planning.Thirdly,this paper uses a large amount of microdata and detailed address coordinates data,reducing the constraints of data limitations in previous studies.Besides,this paper adopts geographical factors in the sample to discuss the dynamics and spatial effects of the policy,and considers the reality of the existing industrial base before the upgrade of national development zones,in order to draw a credible and robust conclusion.