Chinese City Labor Productivity Influence Factor Research

With the acceleration of urbanization, improving labor productivity has attracted more attention by city government and society. And what are the factors influencing urban labor productivity? What are the interaction effects of these variables on urban labor productivity, especially the impact on urban labor productivity magnitude, priority order etc.? The answers to those questions is the focus of this study.Prior studies on urban labor productivity factors is limited to economic density, geographic distance, market segmentation, infrastructure and so on, and ignore the importance of marketization process into the research model. Second, the interacting mechanism between factors is not clear. Third, there is a lack of priority order of factors influencing urban labor productivity. Fourth, the nature endowment of geographic distance defining and substitution is not taken into account. Researchers just consider the mileage between cities and neglect the effect of traffic accessibility. Therefore, this study attempts to integrate the above four dimensions together, and provide explicit explanations and subsequent policy implications on factors influencing urban labor productivity.This study proceeds as follows:to begin with, this paper introduces research background and significance of urban labor productivity. Second, research questions, objectives, research framework are presented, and major concepts are defined. Third, analyzing the internal mechanism of how related variables influence urban labor productivity, and hypothesis are proposed in this section. Spatial Econometrics (lagged) models are used to empirically test the hypothesis. Finally, conclusions and limitations are put forward in the last section.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:1. By combing through the mechanism of urban labor productivity, this study builds spacial econometrics models by introducing marketization and improved geographical distance factors. The empirical results show that economy density, marketization process are positively related with urban labor productivity; geographical distance is negatively correlated with urban labor productivity; diversification and market segmentation are negatively but insignificantly related.2. This study analyzes the interaction effects of partial influencing factors on the magnitude of urban labor productivity, shedding light on its economic significance. The empirical results show that the significant interaction effects are as follows:marketization process by geographical distance, marketization process by market segmentation, diversification by enonomic density, diversification by geographical distance.3. This study also prioritizes the direction and magnitude of factors affecting urban labor productivity. The sequential order of factors based on magnitude and statistical significance is diversification by economic density, marketization process, diversification by geographical distance, marketization process by geographical distance, economic density in terms of positive relations, and geographical distance, marketization by market segmentation.