城市用地扩张、规模经济与经济增长质量

城市用地扩张不仅影响经济增长数量,还通过产业结构升级、城市化、生态环境变化和规模经济等路径影响区域经济增长质量。城市用地扩张,促进市场范围扩大,有利于区域内与区域间开展分工合作,提升城市的集聚经济效益与规模经济水平;但若城市用地扩张使区域突破最优规模经济状态后,因管理与服务成本、交通成本和环境成本等快速增加,城市规模效率会下降,对经济增长质量产生负影响。实证研究结果表明:在全国、中部和西部地区3个空间维度,城市用地扩张与规模效率间存在倒U型关系,而在东部地区此关系并不成立;在4个空间维度,城市用地扩张通过规模经济路径对全要素生产率的影响都为负,表明城市用地扩张已使各区域突破最优规模经济状态,土地要素投入存在冗余现象,与资本、劳动等要素配置比例非最优。研究结果还表明,人力资本、城市化、产业结构升级、基础设施等变量对经济增长质量有正影响。

Urban Land Expansion,Economies of Scale and Quality of Economic Growth

Despite the fact that the relationship between urban land expansion and economic growth has been repeatedly studied in recent years, little attention has been paid to the effect of urban land expansion on the quality of economic growth. We propose that urban land expansion not only influences economic growth, but also has effect on the quality of economic growth through industrial structure upgrading, urbanization, ecological environmental change and economies of scale. This paper focuses on the effect of urban land expansion on the quality of economic growth through the change of economies of scale. We know that construction land expansion lays foundation for carrying on more capital investment, employment and industrial activity in urban area, and that land expansion is helpful to enlarge the scope of market and to attract more companies and population to concentrate in cities, therefore it improves agglomerative and scale economy. But if the city is too big to be beyond the optimal scale, urban land expansion will bring more administrative, transportation and environmental costs, resulting in a negative impact on the quality of economic growth. Therefore there may be inverted U-shaped relationship between urban land expansion and quality of economic growth. To explore the relationship between them, econometric method was used to analyze relevant data of China during the period of 2001-2012. The sample of this study includes 30 provinces except Tibet autonomous in mainland China due to incomplete statistics. Our results showed that the inverted U-shaped curve between urban land expansion and scale efficiency existed in the space dimensions of the central area, the western area and the whole country, but not statistically significant in the eastern area. Secondly, the results showed that the conclusion is robust that urban land expansion has negative effect on total factor productivity through economies of scale in four spatial dimensions, indicating that urban land has exceeded the optimal scale, and capital, land and labor are not in the best proportion. Thirdly, the results found that human capital, urbanization, industrial structure upgrading, and infrastructure have positive impact on the quality of economic growth, which are consistent with other literature conclusions. The contribution of this paper is that we have explored the effect of urban land expansion on total factor productivity, while other studies focus on the effect on economic growth. The results have two implications for making polices. The first one is that urban land expansion should be controlled within a reasonable range to meet the needs of economic development and residents living. The second one is that land use efficiency should be intensified to a greater extent. Land use intensity would substitute for urban land expansion to reduce land investment.