Urbanization Promoted by Government: The Helping Hand or the Grabbing Hand?
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| Title | Urbanization Promoted by Government: The Helping Hand or the Grabbing Hand?
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| Author | Lu Shengfeng,Chen Sixia and Zhang Dongjie |
| Organization | WUHAN University; Zhongnan University of Economics and Law; Columbia University in the City of New York |
| Email | shengflu@whu.edu.cn；sixia_chen02@126.com；dz2285@columbia.edu |
| Key Words | Urbanization Promoted by Government; Annexation Suburban Counties by Cities; Helping Hand; Grabbing Hand; Synthetic Control Methods |
| Abstract | This paper constructs the synthetic control methods for studying the urbanization promoted by government, and analyses the effects on economic development of counties, based on the natural experiment of “annexation suburban counties by cities” in China. The result shows that: (1) the urbanization promoted by government does play a helping hand for economic development of counties in most cases, while it fails to enhance substantial urbanization of population in short term; (2) for the causal mechanism, the urbanization process does strengthen total fiscal revenue and expenditure of counties, and increase those expenditure on public goods. Under the background of rapid urbanization in China, we need to maintain sharp vigilance for the two potential problems: formal urbanization and grabbing urbanization. Meanwhile, overly-rapid or excessive-interposed urbanization may also be harmful for the healthy development of economy. |
| Serial Number | WP938 |
| Time | 2015-10-27 |
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