An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between City Scale And City Efficiency

Since the reform and opening up, the China’s economy developed rapidly, the urbanization level, up from 17.92% in 1978 to 49.68% in 2010. However, with the expansion of the city, the traffic congestion, the rise in price, problems such as crime rate rising is more and more obviously, and how to determine the optimal a city scale become common attention from all walks of the topic. This paper uses a model to estimate the relationship between the output efficiency and the labor scales of city with different size. We adopt the data of 238 prefecture-level city to carry out nonlinear regression and linear regression, calculating the optimal size of different cities to maximize productive efficiency. The model postulates an inverted U shape of city efficiency against city size. I find that the size of most cities is smaller than their optimal size in our country. Through comparing the added value of tertiary industry per capita in optimal population size and the actual population scale, calculate the efficiency loss of existing city scale. According to the regression results, most of our country city population size less than optimal scale. So, I think the government should loosen the population migration restriction to expand the city scale For Beijing, Shanghai and other city whose scale larger than the optimal city size can improve labor structure and strengthen labor education. By this way, they can reduce the population pressure. At the same time, all of the city should provide higher quality public services to improve production efficiency, promote urban size limit, and increase labor income.