Agricultural Geographical Agglomeration In China: Spatial And Temporal Characteristics, Formation Mechanism And Growth Effect

With the acceleration of industrialization and urbanization, agricultural agglomeration forms in China and its contribution made on modern agricultural growth becomes more and more obvious. So it is urgent to study its current situation, evolution law, formation mechanism and influence on agricultural growth. The traditional trade theory believes that the comparative advantage determines the layout of agricultural production, while New Trade theory and New Economic Geography bring transportation costs and increasing returns to scale in the industry agglomeration theory, providing a new interpretation. Current researches regarding to the industrial agglomeration focus on the manufacturing industry, but seldom on the agricultural sector. In all, the topic of this article is meaningful both in theoretical research and political practice.According to the research progress, we believe that monographic study on agricultural geographical agglomeration can be expanded in the following aspects: Firstly, considering the fact that the existing research on agricultural agglomeration is usually based on the Traditional Trade theory instead of New Economic Geography, we decide to make efforts to expand the application of New Economic Geography in agricultural field; Secondly, the measurement of the agricultural agglomeration level was mainly in a single perspective in the past and there is a lack of a comprehensive empirical analysis system for the spatial and temporal characteristics and evolution law of agricultural agglomeration; Thirdly, the existing literature on the formation and influence mechanism of agricultural agglomeration are mainly about theoretical analysis, yet data support and empirical verification could be a good supplement. What lead to the crops concentration in some special region? What affect the agglomeration? The discussion about the formation mechanism and the influence of agricultural agglomeration are the cores of this paper; Fourthly, due to the existence of agglomeration effects and scale economy, what effects will the formation of agglomeration have on agricultural growth? Is the influence significant? These four aspects above form the focus of this paper.As for the empirical analysis, this paper starts with a systematic investigation on stylized facts of agriculture geographical agglomeration in terms of the regional average agglomeration rate, the location quotient and the Krugman index from aspects of whole agglomeration level, industry specialization and the division of region. Besides, the exploratory spatial data analysis(ESDA) is applied to measure the spatial correlation of crop production. Then, based on the stylized facts of agriculture agglomeration, the research compared regional differences on land productivity, labor productivity and capital productivity of the representative crop according to the data from national agricultural products cost-benefit from the perspective of production factor allocation efficiency to explore the causes of the concentrated geographical phenomenon. Furthermore, based on the New Economic Geography theory and the classic resource endowment theory, as well as the spatial externalities, this paper presents a theoretical four-dimensional analysis framework to analyze the main factors of provincial agricultural agglomeration in China using spatial econometric models. Finally, spatial econometric model and the static panel data model are applied to analyze the effect of agricultural agglomeration on agriculture growth from the overall and industrial level, respectively. What’s more, a comparison study is made on the contribution difference among various corps.Through the research above, this paper draws the following conclusions:(1) On the whole level, the vast majority of provinces are on the moderate concentration level, which suggests that agriculture agglomeration in China has formed, while average agglomeration rate in most part of the eastern and central regions shows a downward trend. In the view of professional division of labor, there are obvious differences in industrial and regional aspects. On the industrial level, the average level of specialization of economic crops is higher than food crop, but on the regional level, there are eight provinces, including Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Jilin, and Heilongjiang, in which the regional division of labor are more prominent, at the situation of improvement in division of labor in the whole country. These areas belong to different types respectively: Xinjiang and Qinghai belong to the ecological fragile area in Western China, Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan belong to the southeast economic developed regions, Jilin and Heilongjiang belong to traditional agricultural areas. Furthermore, from the agricultural spatial correlation, compared with labor intensive crops, land intensive crops show closer spatial correlation.(2) Under the market economy, difference on the efficiency of resource allocation is an important factor that leads to the concentration of industrial geography. It is found that the market demand results in a certain geographical concentration of typical crops, yet different industries have different geographical concentration driving factors. The comparative advantage of labor productivity is the reason that maize production gather together in the northeast and Inner Mongolia area, and the comparative advantage of land productivity is another favorable factor for Jilin and Inner Mongolia. Relative advantage of land productivity is the main reason that wheat production in Shandong and Hebei, while relative advantage of capital productivity results in the wheat agglomeration in Anhui and Henan. The absolute advantage of land productivity and comparative advantage of labor productivity both make efforts in speeding up the geographical concentration of peanut in Shandong province. The main reason why citrus production concentrated in Zhejiang, Hubei and Guangdong is that the land productivity in these areas has a comparative advantage. Besides, the comparative advantage of capital productivity in Hubei and relative advantage of labor productivity in Zhejiang promote the agglomeration of the citrus production, respectively, and citrus production form geographical concentration in Fujian, due to its relative advantage of labor productivity.(3) Based on the new trade theory and the New Economic Geography theory, this paper constructs the analytical framework of "natural conditions- technology externalities- financial externalities- institution". Through the sptial panel data model and spatial externality analysis, the research shows that mechanization level, density of road, and level of industrialization have positive effect on agriculture agglomeration. This precisely confirms the importance of spatial externality factors in agricultural agglomeration. However, the impact of urbanization, government’s financial support and natural disasters on agricultural agglomeration are not significant.(4) The empirical results show that the agricultural geographical agglomeration has a significant positive effect on the growth of agriculture, and the promotion is mainly reflected in the indirect effect. Besides, contribution of agglomeration effect on agriculture growth varies among industries. While in the same industry, agglomeration effect in areas with high agglomeration level differs from that in the low agglomeration level to some extent. Agglomeration effects may have not exerted itself in areas with low agglomeration level, like the peanut industry.In general, compared to previous researches, this paper makes the following progress:(1) making attempt to study agricultural geography empirically from the perspective of resource allocation efficiency;(2) applying the theory of new economic geography theory to agriculture agglomeration, building a theoretical four-dimensional analysis framework, using spatial autoregressive model and spatial error model to test the hypothesis raised in the paper, and making up the limitation of previous research in theoretical analysis;(3) using spatial econometric model to confirm the overall effect agglomeration on agriculture growth, supplementing the shortcomings of previous studies, which are more focused on R&D, household contract responsibility system, technical progress and ignore geographical factors. Theoretical contribution is made by the research on agricultural agglomeration from the three aspects above. In fact, the study of this article can provide support for macro decision-making.