"Dual Opening Up" And Manufacturing Agglomeration In China: Theory And Evidence

Manufacturing agglomeration has received much attention from recent academic research which focuses on the elements identification. Among many studies, the relationship between the opening up and the manufacturing agglomeration is an important topic. However the foregone studies only pay attention to the impact of the international opening up on the manufacturing agglomeration instead of the interregional opening up or both. This thesis attempts to analyze the internal relationship between the "dual opening up" and manufacturing agglomeration theoretically and empirically under the framework covering the international opening up and the interregional opening up.In theory, this thesis provides mechanisms through which the international opening up and the interregional opening up promote the manufacturing agglomeration based on present literature. In particular, the international opening up promotes the manufacturing agglomeration mainly through export mechanism, foreighn direct investment mechanism and outward direct investment mechanism. The interregional opening up promotes the manufacturing agglomeration mainly through commodity mobility mechanism, capital mobility mechanism and labor mobility mechanism. Based on the special regional opening-up route in China, this thesis constructs an analytic framework and model concerning the dual opening up and manufacturing agglomeration, which can be used to analyze the impact of the dual opening up on the dynamic changes of the manufacturing agglomeration in China. The framework and model show that the international opening up results in the manufacturing agglomeration in China and the interregional opening up would reinforce such agglomeration mode through the commodity, capital and labor mechanisms. In the long run, the relationship between the dual opening up and the Chinese manufacturing agglomeration is an inverted-U shape. That is, with the increase of the international and interregional opening up, the manufacturing agglomeration would increase first and then decrease.Empirically, based on the changes in the emphasis of the dual opening up of regional economies, this thesis firstly examines the mode and characteristics of the manufacturing spatial distribution from three stages, that is, central planning stage, international opening up stage and the dual opening up stage. The results show that the manufacturing distribution in the central planning stage appears to be scatter. However such distribution has changed into agglomeration during the international opening up stage. And the manufacturing agglomeration continues to increase during the dual opening up stage.Then this thesis examines the relationship between the dual opening up and manufacturing agglomeration in China empirically. By constructing the composed indexes of international and interregional opening up, this thesis analyzes the extent of provincial international and interregional opening up in China. After that, the empirical checking of the relationship between the dual opening up and the manufacturing agglomeration focuses on four levels successively. The first level is the general connection between the dual opening up and manufacturing agglomeration, which has been identified by the data analysis and the correlation analysis. The second level is the dual opening up element in all pro-agglomeration factors, which has been proved by the econometric analysis. The third level is the difference of the dual opening up effects in different stages. The results show that the international opening up has more impact on the manufacturing agglomeration than the interregional opening up before WTO and the interregional opening up has more impact on the manufacturing agglomeration than the international opening up after WTO. The fourth level is the nonlinear relationship between the dual opening up and manufacturing agglomeration in China. The results show that the dual opening up will increase the manufacturing agglomeration further instead of decreasing it, since the extent of the Chinese manufacturing agglomeration is not high. After all, the four level checkings above provide evidences for the relationship between the dual opening up and manufacturing agglomeration in China.Finally, this thesis provides the directions for the future research. And according to the scientific development view, it also gives some policy implications on the coordination of regional economies from the dual opening-up perspectives.