Administrative Boundary Adjustment and Urbanization of Population:Evidence form City-county Merger in China
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| Title | Administrative Boundary Adjustment and Urbanization of Population:Evidence form City-county Merger in China
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| Author | Tang Wei and Wang Yuan |
| Organization | Fudan University, East China Normal University |
| Email | tangwei616@126.com；ywang@jjx.ecnu.com.cn |
| Key Words | City-county merger, urbanization, population agglomeration, entropy balancing, DID |
| Abstract | Administrative boundary adjustment is one of the effective tools for central government to promote urbanization. Whether the government-dominated urban space expansion could promote population agglomeration needs to be empirically tested. Based on census data in 2000 and 2010 together with prefecture economic datasets, this paper chooses city-county merger taking place between 2000 and 2004 as events to answer that question. Using Entropy Balancing and Matching methods to deal with selection bias problem, we found that city-county merger reforms significantly promote urban population’s growth. The growth effects are mostly coming from migrants from within home counties and from other provinces rather than local Hukou population’s growth. In addition, eastern cities and cities with greater market potential have larger growth effects. This paper further explored the mechanisms of the merger effects, arguing that local market integration and urban agglomeration economies help increase firms’ productivity and employment. We use industrial micro survey data to justify that argument. The findings indicate that large cities can play a more positive role in promoting population urbanization, which is of great significance in achieving goals of people-oriented urbanization. |
| Serial Number | WP868 |
| Time | 2015-05-12 |
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