| Urban is a place where population,economic activities and other factors gather.It is also the core of economic development of a country or region,and its status in economic development is gradually improving.With the rapid development of the national economy,Chinese cities have also ushered in a golden period,with great changes in both the number and size of cities.In 2016,the number of cities at the Prefectural level and above reached 297,about 2.91 times that of 1978.Urbanization rose rapidly from 17.92% in 1978 to 57.35% in 2016.The average Gross Domestic Product(GDP)growth rate of cities above the Prefectural level was 7.55%.More than 50% of cities grew faster than their average.Cities became a huge engine of China’s economic growth.Although China’s cities have achieved leapfrog development,it is a rapid and radical development path.We pay too much attention to the improvement of the “quantity”of cities and neglect the development of the “quality” of cities.As our country economist Wu jinglian thinks,our country’s urban development has made encouraging achievements,but like our country’s overall economic development,the current urban development is inefficient.This existing urban development model leads to a series of crises and contradictions in urban development.The scale of city has blindly expanded,and resources have been wasted.The characteristics of high investment and low output are obvious.Problems such as persistent smog,water pollution and shortage of drinking water resources are endless.Urban “diseases” such as urban traffic congestion,unemployment,housing,education,medical and other resource constraints have also gradually emerged.All this have seriously affected the quality of life of urban residents.Urban development is not real development and does not reflect the essence of development and the concept of people-centered development,resulting in low urban efficiency and development quality.The Central Urban Work Conference pointed out and emphasized that we must adhere to the direction of intensive development,change the model of urban development,improve the quality of urban environment and the quality of life of residents,promote the transformation of urban development from an extension to a connotation,and enhance the sustainability of urban development.Under the current problems of urban development and the policy background of the country,how to achieve high-quality development and improve the efficiency of urban development is the key to achieve sustainable urban development and improve competitiveness,and it has become the focus of theoretical and practical attention.In view of this,this study makes a comprehensive measurement of urban efficiency in China and analyzes its influencing factors in order to provide a basis and reference for high efficiency and high quality urban development policy formulation.This study attempts to follow the idea of “problem proposition-theoretical framework-empirical analysis-policy research”.Fist,through background analysis,it determines the research purpose,method.It summarizes and combs the basic theory and literature review to clarify the basis and progress of the research.Secondly,it constructs the theoretical framework of the thesis.It defines the concepts of efficiency and urban efficiency clearly,and based on this,clarifies the basic content of input and output.Through literature combing and theoretical analysis,from the perspective of a single city,this paper expounds and analyzes the influence mechanism and path of industrial structure,economic agglomeration,human capital,R&D innovation,government intervention,environmental regulation,institutional factors,opening to the outside world and city scale on urban efficiency.It extends the efficiency optimization mechanism within a single city into inter-city linkages,and discusses the theoretical mechanism of factor flow,infrastructure integration,knowledge sharing and spillover,industrial division and collaboration and market unification on urban efficiency based on the perspective of urban linkages.Thirdly,this paper makes use of the loose SBM directional distance function to measure and analyze the efficiency of 260 cities above ground level in China,and analyzes the efficiency differences of cities in the different region,different city size and different administrative levels.The reason of urban inefficiency is decomposed from the point of factor input and output.Then,based on the theoretical analysis of the third chapter,from the perspective of a single city,an empirical analysis of the influencing factors of urban efficiency is made.From the perspective of the overall level and the efficiency differences of different types of cities,the impact degree and its changes are analyzed.The Shapli decomposition method based on regression results is further used to analyze the contribution of various influencing factors to the efficiency differences between cities,and to explore the main reason of different urban efficiency changes.In addition,from the perspective of inter-city linkages,the efficiency enhancement effect of inter-city linkages is verified by the synthetic control method,that is,the externality of urban networks.Taking the Yangtze River Delta,Pearl River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei as example,this paper uses the panel measurement model and the Shapli decomposition method to empirically study on factor flow,infrastructure integration,knowledge sharing and spillover,industrial division and collaboration and market unification on urban efficiency and its contribution in the view of inter-city linkages.Finally,according to the above theories and empirical analysis,from the view of urban efficiency,we reflect on the urban development of our country,and put forward the path of urban efficiency improvement in our country in the future.Through the above analysis,this paper draws the following main research conclusions.First,traditional economic efficiency and environmental efficiency considering resource and environmental constraints do not full reflect the level of urban efficiency and the quality of urban development.The development of city is not only the economic growth and ecological environmental protection and improvement,but also the improvement of the welfare level of urban residents and social progress.The improvement of the well-being level of residents is the ultimate goal of urban development.This paper holds that urban efficiency is based on less investment,as much as possible to generate more economic benefits and achieve social progress aimed at improving the quality of life of residents,while at the same time having less impact on the ecological environment,so as to realize urban economic benefits,environmental benefits and social benefits.Second,the urban efficiency of our country is in the low level.There is a great degree of urban efficiency loss.Both traditional economic efficiency and environmental efficiency considering resource environment will overestimate the real level of urban efficiency.The urban efficiency level presents a “W” wave trend around 0.6 in time.The number of cities with effective and high efficiency is relatively small,and most cities are at medium and low efficiency level.From the three regions of East,Central and West,the average urban efficiency shows a high trend in the East and a slightly lower trend in the central and western regions.In terms of the size of different cities,the average efficiency level of mega-cities is the highest,followed by small cities,and the efficiency level of Super cities,large cities and medium-sized cities is low.From the different administrative levels of cities,the higher the level of urban administration,the higher the efficiency.Through the decomposition of urban efficiency loss,it is found that the main causes of urban efficiency loss in China are redundancy of natural resources and excessive environmental pollution.The inefficient contribution of the expected output of social development is still second only to natural resources and environmental pollution.The inefficient contribution of this three factors show an increasing trend.During the sample period,there is no significantαconvergence of urban efficiency,but there are absolute β convergence and conditional β convergence.The gap within the country and the three regions,different scales,and different administrative levels is gradually narrowing,and each city converges to its own steady state level.Third,the effects of advanced industrial structure,human capital,R&D and innovation,and opening to the outside world on urban efficiency are positive and significant.The government’s intervention and environmental regulation are not conducive to the improvement of urban efficiency.The influence of economic agglomeration and urban scale on urban efficiency is inverted U.Economic agglomeration,advanced industrial structure,and urban scale contribute are the main driving forces for improving urban efficiency,and the positive influence of industrial structure optimization has gradually strengthened.Although human capital and R&D innovation have relatively little impact on urban efficiency,their positive effects tend to increase.The influence direction and contribution of these factors are different in the different region,city scale and administrative level.Fourth,Synthetic control method of quasi-natural experiment is used to verify the efficiency enhancement effect of inter-city Association,namely network externality.Further empirical analysis has found that cross-regional mobility of factors,infrastructure integration and the formation of a unified market are conducive to the improvement of urban efficiency.The rational layout of inter-city industries and coordination and division of labor can effectively increase the efficiency of cities in the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta region.However,for Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei,the positive impact of industrial division of labor cooperation is not significant.Knowledge spillover and sharing can not effectively promote urban efficiency.The sample results show that infrastructure integration,industrial division and collaboration,and unified markets promote efficiency in core and peripheral cities.Factor flow,knowledge spillover and sharing have significant positive effects on the efficiency of core cities and negative effects on peripheral cities.According to the Shapli decomposition method,the improvement of urban efficiency by the externality of inter-city network connection in the Yangtze River Delta depends on the frequent flow of urban factors and the rational distribution and division of labor.The Pearl River Delta mainly relies on the integration of infrastructure and industrial division of labor.The improvement of urban efficiency in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei mainly benefits from the flow of urban factors.Compared with the single city influencing factors,the variable associated with externalities of inter-city network connection have a relatively large impact on urban efficiency.The improvement of core urban efficiency by the externality of inter-city network connection depends on industrial division of labor collaboration and unified market,while the improvement of peripheral urban efficiency is due to industrial division and integration of infrastructure.In the course of this research,the following innovations are sought.First,it enriches the connotation of urban efficiency and emphasizes the multi-objective output of urban economic growth,ecological environment and social development.Urban efficiency is based on less investment,as much as possible to generate more economic benefits and achieve social progress aimed at improving the quality of life of residents,while at the same time having less impact on the ecological environment,so as to realize urban economic benefits,environmental benefits and social benefits.In the system of input-output indicators,this paper includes indicators of the level of well-being of residents and social development.It can more comprehensively measure the level of urban efficiency and the quality of urban development.Second,it expands the optimal influence mechanism of urban efficiency,and extends the influence mechanism of efficiency from individual cities to inter-city relations.Existing literature has studied the influencing factors of urban efficiency only from the inside of a single city and ignored the characteristics of the "second nature" of the city,which is contrary to reality.Therefore,this paper extend the influencing factors of urban efficiency from individual cities to inter-city network connections,and propose that inter-city network linkages have efficiency enhancement effects,that is,the inter-city network connection externality.Factor flow,knowledge spillover,infrastructure integration,industrial division and market unification are the main factors driving urban efficiency increase.At the same time,this paper analyzes the influence of the above mechanism factors on efficiency and its contribution.It places cities in a variety of "flow" spaces to find the dynamic path of urban efficiency.Provide a more comprehensive basis for urban efficiency optimization.Third,the impact of inter-city network connection on urban development and efficiency stems from its externalities which are shared by cities within the linkages,and promote the efficiency of cities.As a typical example of inter-city network association development,urban agglomerations provide a good research material for us to indentify the the inter-city network connection externality.So in this paper,by constructing quasi-natural experiment,the addition of urban agglomerations is regarded as a quasi-natural experiment to evaluate inter-city network connection externality.The synthetic control method can avoid the problems of endogenous and missing variable of the linear regression model,and solve the selective deviation problem of the double difference method and the tendency score matching method,and reduce the subjective factors of weight selection. |
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