Bureaucratic Transfer And The Convergence Of Industrial Structure

Bureaucratic transfer creates a dynamic linkage between where the officials have previous worked and where they are transferred,and can influence the flow of economic resources between city-dyads by enhancing trade ties and attracting investment.So,how does this inter-city resource reallocation affect the industrial structure between city-dyads? This study calculates the output data on four-digit manufacturing industry and industrial structure convergence between city-dyads using Chinese Industrial Enterprise Data(1998-2014),combines with prefecture-level bureaucratic transfer data and prefecture-level city economic and social data,and finally constructs a dataset of 105,950 city-dyads nationwide from 1998-2014.On this basis,this study considers bureaucratic transfer as a quasi-natural experiment to estimate the impact of bureaucratic transfer on industrial structure convergence between city-dyads using a multi-period Difference-in-Differences model.It is found that:(1)Bureaucratic transfer significantly leads to a convergence of industrial structures between the former and the transferred cities,and this finding still holds after several robustness checks;(2)the effect of bureaucratic transfer on the convergence of industrial structures between city-dyads has a certain lag,which is generally prominent two years after the transferred officials take office,and this effect also fades away as the transferred officials leave;(3)The effect of bureaucratic transfer on the convergence of industrial structure between city-dyads varies with the position of transfer officials,the type of transfer and the area of transfer.The contribution of this study is to expand the ways in which transfer officials influence regional economic development and deepen the understanding of the impact of bureaucratic transfer on inter-city economic linkages.