Research On The Integration Of The Yangtze River Delta Metropolitan Area With Shanghai As The Core

On November 5 2018,at the opening ceremony of the first China International Import Expo,President Xi Jinping announced regional integration of the Yangtze River Delta as national strategies.In November 2019,Xi Jinping pointed out during his second inspection of Shanghai that Shanghai should accelerate the promotion of urban energy levels and core competitiveness,solidly promote the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta,and improve the governance capacity and level of the socialist modernized international metropolis.On December 2019,the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council jointly issued an outline of the integrated regional development of the Yangtze River Delta.Under the broad framework of national development strategy,Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta region will usher in a new period of important historical development opportunities and major challenge.For a long time,the Yangtze River Delta region has always been one of the regions with the strongest comprehensive economic strength and the most active economic factors in China,and has received widespread attention from scholars at home and abroad.However,most of the existing researches are from the perspective of traditional economics and most of the research methods use traditional econometric models.Although those research have a certain positive effect on understanding the Yangtze River Delta,perspectives and methods of traditional research are not suitable for the analysis of rapid development of regional integration.As global integration spreads urban and regional connections from regions and countries to the world,more and more scholars realize that urban and regional research must break through the limits of traditional economics and require a broader perspective on cities and regions.The theoretical assumptions and research framework of regional research are adjusted,and cities and regions are included asnodes to be studied in the category of large networks.This article combines traditional regional economics theory with the global urban network theory,and incorporates the Yangtze River Delta metropolitan area into the framework and category of the urban network.The research has been carried out in research and development,and the INM model(inter-city interlocking network model)has been revised and expanded from the perspectives of asymmetric inter-city relations,backward regions,and sub-regions.To a certain extent,it has explored and enriched regional economic theory from the perspective of interdisciplinary.First,the process of urban-rural integration development in Shanghai is reviewed.The research focuses on the evolution of Shanghai's administrative divisions,government-led policies and strategic planning,and divides the evolution stages of urban-rural integration in Shanghai.In addition,the main driving factors for the integration of the metropolitan area are also discussed.The relationship between industrial structure adjustment,regional integration policies,and metropolitan area integration is mainly discussed using the examples of New York and Tokyo.Second,based on the contact data of branches of large logistics enterprises in the Yangtze River Delta Area,this essay surveys the Yangtze River Delta network with the data from Aggregate City Interlock Links,Social Distance and Asymmetrical Relations between Cities.The results show that,on the one hand,connectivities between center cities are highly concentrated and occupy the center position of the city network.On the other hand,peripheral cities' indicators are behind in the edge position of the network;The Yangtze River Delta urban network is the formation of multiple centers stimulating economic growth of peripheral cities.In addition it is found that because of urban threshold effect the enterprises outside the Yangtze River Delta are due to select to settle in central cities rather than the core city,Shanghai.Suxichang and Nanjing metropolitan area maintains the closest contact with Shanghai.After 4 years' development,the inter-city connections in the Yangtze River Delta metropolitan area have generally increased,indicating that the urbanconnections are closer,but the city rankings have not changed much.Integrated development in the Yangtze River Delta,although the city has not stepped out of the scope of this level,the rankings of the sub-center cities and the periphery have changed significantly,concentrated in the rapid development of cities in Zhejiang.Finally,based on panel data of the three provinces and one city in the Yangtze River Delta for about 20 years from 1997 to 2018,the empirical test of the promotion effect of regional integration policies on the high-quality economic development of the Yangtze River Delta metropolitan area has been adopted.With the level of economic growth intensification was adopted as the regional economy measures of high-quality development.Firstly,three hypotheses have been proposed,which believed that regional integration policies can promote high-quality development of the regional economy through industrial structure adjustment,and further divided industrial structure adjustment into industrial structure differentiation and industrial structure heightening.This path has a more significant effect on the high-quality economic development of the Yangtze River Delta metropolitan area.In order to ensure the robustness of the empirical results,the core explanatory variables of this paper are respectively measured by economic indicators and policy indicators.The empirical results show that the regional integration policy can promote the high-quality development of the regional economy through industrial structure adjustment,but the two paths under the industrial structure adjustment have different effects.The two ones have significant differences and the role of a highly industrialized path.The effect is greater than that of the industrial structure differentiation path.From the existing practical experience,the main reason for this difference in implementation effects may be that,local governments of all levels tend to choose the highest efficiency return when applying regional integration policies in order to promote the use of various production factors.With the above research results,the following policy recommendations are proposed for the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta metropolitan area:First,it is necessary to increase the proportion of large quality domestic and foreign enterprises and further reduce the proportion of low-end backward enterprises staying in Shanghai.Second,the radiation pulling effect of the core city Shanghai and other central cities on the Yangtze River Delta metropolitan area,especially on peripheral cities,should be further enhanced.Third,it is recommended to further increase the urban energy level of those central cities and increase the city's carrying capacity to narrow the gap with Shanghai.Fourth,we must further optimize the industrial structure and promote high-quality development of the regional economy.