A Study On The Agglomeration Level And Influencing Factors Of China’s Manufacturing Industry

In recent years, the topic about the industrial structure adjustment and upgrading continues to heat up in China. With gradual disappearance of Chinese demographic dividend and constant increase of labor costs, the development of Chinese manufacturing industry is facing greater challenges. How to solve this problem is closely related to the sustainability of China’s economic growth. The research on China’s manufacturing industrial agglomeration degree is essential to understand the current situation and developing trends of manufacturing, which is of significance to the discuss of the current structural adjustment and industrial upgrading.Firstly, this paper reviews related literatures on industrial distribution and industrial agglomeration from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. The theoretical literatures introduced in this paper mainly focus on the industrial distribution and related theories of influential factors of industry agglomeration. The empirical literatures mainly focus on empirical analysis of industrial agglomeration at home and abroad, especially those in China. Secondly, this article analyzes overall distribution of manufacturing industry, demonstrates specific distribution change of manufacturing industry, analyze the degree of industrial agglomeration in different areas from regional perspective by using gross industrial output value of 20 sub-sectors of manufacturing industry and the industrial differences of industrial geographic concentration degrees. The above analysis shows that the tendency of constantly agglomerating in eastern region has come to an end, while manufacturing industry in other areas mainly in the middle and the western grows rapidly, in other words, manufacturing industry is transferring to the middle and western areas, which may change "eastern centralization-middle and western marginalization" distribution pattern before and establishes a new manufacturing agglomeration center in middle and western areas. In addition, this article analyzes influential factors of industrial agglomeration mainly from the perspectives of traditional economic geography, new economic geography and effects of policies. At last, through empirical analysis, it finds that transport conditions, potentiality of markets, industrial externality and the effects of government have a positive influence on industrial agglomeration, while high relative labor cost has a negative effect. Therefore, eastern areas’rapid increase of factor costs compared to the middle and western areas is one of the primary momentums of industrial transferring. However, the effects mention above is different to industries of different factor types. Labor-intensive industry and recourses-depended industry are more sensitive to relative labor cost, while capital-intensive industry and technology-intensive industry are more to industrial externality and effects of government. In addition, compared to labor-intensive industry, capital-intensive industry and technology-intensive industry are more susceptible to potentiality of markets.