Will Government-driven Urbanization Exacerbate Urbanization Imbalances? -- Empirical Evidence from "Abolishing County and Establishing City-administered District"

Yongxing Bian

doi:10.54097/hbem.v9i.9246

Authors

Yongxing Bian

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54097/hbem.v9i.9246

Keywords:

Abolishing County and Establishing City-administered District; Urbanization Imbalance; Population Urbanization; Land Urbanization; Seeking Development Through Land Use.

Abstract

As a major form of administrative division adjustment in China since the reform and opening up, abolishing county and establishing district policy has reshaped the regional administrative power structure, which in turn has had a profound impact on regional economic and social development. Based on data from population census and land survey, this paper uses the general OLS method to estimate the effect of abolishing county and establishing city-administered district reform on the imbalance of urbanization development in prefecture-level cities. The study finds that the reform of abolishing counties and setting up districts softens the constraint of construction land targets and creates favorable conditions for local governments to "seek development through land use", but the larger supply of construction land eventually exacerbates the imbalance between population urbanization and land urbanization, and this finding still holds for cities where the initial relationship between people and land is not tense. By region, the effect of urbanization imbalance exacerbated by abolishing county and establishing district policy is significant in the eastern region but not in the central and western regions; moreover, the effect of urbanization imbalance exacerbated by county revocation is weakened in cities with higher degree of financial deepening. The rapid urbanization with land as the core has supported China's rapid economic growth for a long time in the past, but the role of land as an economic engine is declining. Promoting a new type of people-oriented urbanization and making efforts to improve the quality of urbanization construction is the right way to transform China's economic development mode and promote high-quality development in the future.

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