Research On Economic Performance And Mechanism Of Urban Spatial Form

This dissertation comprehensively investigates the economic performance of the urban spatial form and its mechanism using data from satellite image,statistical yearbook and surveys.Precisely,this dissertation studies the economic consequences of urban spatial compactness from perspectives of fact analysis,causal identification,and mechanism interpretation,thereby proposing policy suggestions for urban spatial form optimization,rational distribution of factors,production and consumption promotion.To study the economic impact of urban spatial form,this dissertation highlights three questions.Will urban spatial form promote economic growth?How urban spatial form affects enterprise production efficiency? How urban spatial form affects household consumption? Finally,the dissertation proposes conclusions and research prospects based on the current macro policy background and the status of urban spatial form in China.The dissertation includes seven chapters.Research is conducted in order of typical patterns,literature reviews,questions and solutions.The main contents of each chapter are as follows.The first chapter is an introduction to the dissertation.It presents the research background,the research ideas,methods,and main innovation points of the paper.Under the background of economic "new normal" and the "new urbanization",the pressure of urban expansion,especially the risk of disorderly expansion,continues to increase.How to optimize the spatial form of the city thereby attracting more population and industries is currently one of the major challenges for high-quality development of cities.The second chapter is a review of relevant foreign and domestic literature.It introduces theoretical literature related to agglomeration economy,productive cities,and consumer cities and summarizes empirical literature regarding economic growth,enterprise production efficiency and household consumption influenced by urban spatial characteristics.By demonstrating the gaps and deficiencies of the existing literature,the dissertation concludes the innovation of the research.The third chapter is the basic chapter of the dissertation.It introduces the essential information and manipulation of the night-time light data and presents the definition and calculation of urban spatial form indicators.Based on the novel measurement of urban spatial form,the paper describes both the spatial distribution and time trend of the urban spatial form in China.The fact analysis reflects that the compactness of cities first increase,then decrease and finally keep stable.The spatial distribution of compact cities is dispersed,compact form can be observed in both big cities and small cities.The quantification of the urban spatial form provides data set for the research.The fourth chapter estimates the impact of urban spatial form on macroeconomic growth at the city level and focuses on a reliable instrument to deal with the endogeneity problem of the model.A potential urban spatial form indicator,the instrument variable of the actual urban spatial form,is constructed based on the ideal urban expansion process and geographical barriers.Thus,the2 SLS method is used to obtain an unbiased estimate of the promotion effect.By comparing the effect size in different cities,the positive externality of compact urban spatial form is greater in cities with higher population density,larger population scale,and a higher proportion of secondary industry.This heterogeneity means that the promotion effect on the economic growth of the compact urban spatial form depends on the agglomeration of economic factors.The fifth chapter uses the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Database to study the impact of urban spatial form on production efficiency from the micro-enterprise level.The study finds that the compact urban spatial form is conducive to enterprise production efficiency.The paper examines the mechanism of urban space from three aspects: agglomeration effect,firm entry,and innovation effect.The sixth chapter uses China Urban Household Survey to explore the impact of urban spatial form on household consumption at the micro-household level.The results confirm the causal relationship between compact cities and household consumption growth.Mechanism analysis shows that cities with compact spaces increase residents’ willingness to travel,increase consumption opportunities and promote consumption.Compact cities also raise household consumption levels through income effect,but there is no evidence of wealth effect of the real estate.The seventh chapter explains the relationship among urban economic growth,production and consumption,summarizes the main content and concludes.This part discusses the policy implications based on the empirical results of the dissertation and points out the shortcomings and further research direction in the future.The main conclusions of the paper can be summarized in the following three aspects:First,improving urban spatial compactness is conducive to urban economic growth.The results imposing the instrument variable method show that GDP per capita will increase by 3.2% as the average transportation distance reduces by 1kilometer.The positive externalities of urban spatial form are independent of administrative level and regional location.The improvement of spatial compactness has a greater impact on cities with a larger urban scale,higher population density,and higher proportion of secondary industry in GDP.Second,the production efficiency of the manufacturing enterprises benefits from compact urban spatial form.If the average distance of transportation in the urban area reduces by 1 kilometer,the total factor productivity of the local enterprises will increase by 2.6%.The improvement in urban spatial compactness has a greater effect on labor-intensive and capital-intensive industries.Compared with large enterprises,small and medium-sized enterprises are more susceptible to the negative impact of non-compact urban form.The selection effect is founded among different cities.That is,high-efficiency enterprises are more inclined to locate in compact cities.Results show that spatially compact cities attract high-skilled population and thus promote firm productivity by improving factor quality.Compact cities also attract more enterprises.There is no evidence of the innovation effect to be found.Third,compact urban space is conducive to increasing resident consumption.For every 1 kilometer reduction in transportation distance,the consumption per capita of urban households increases by 3.3%,and this promotion mainly came from food and residential consumption.Low-income households are more sensitive to the negative effects of non-compact urban space.The compact urban spatial form promotes consumption in two ways: promotes transporatation convenience and income effect.Compact city has shorter inner city travel distance and is more convenient in travel.This indicates that compact cities provide positive externalities for consumption by increasing consumption activities.The income effect is manifested in the fact that the compact cities are correlated with higher income of secondary and tertiary industries.This indicates that residents in compact cities consume more by income growth.The study finds no evidence that urban spatial form affects consumption through the wealth effect.This dissertation improves the current study in research perspectives,research contents,and research methods.(1)Innovation of research perspectiveFirst,the dissertation focuses on the diversity of urban forms and innovatively calculates the average distance within the city based on two-dimensional images to measure the urban spatial form.The indexes quantify the compactness of the cities and contain spatial information.Second,based on the theory of consumer cities,the dissertation innovatively analyzes the mechanism of labor supply promotion when discussing the impact of urban spatial form on enterprise production efficiency.Third,the dissertation innovatively analyzes the mechanism of urban spatial form affecting urban household consumption from the perspective of transportation convenience.The research explores that compact city affect household consumption by improving residents’ travel intentions.(2)Innovation of research contentFirst,the dissertation innovatively investigates the impact of urban spatial form on household consumption and finds that compact cities are conducive to increasing residents’ consumption levels.The not only extends the application of the theory of consumer cities,but also provides new empirical support for the theory in the contents of China.Second,the dissertation analyses the mechanisms in detail.The research estimates the causal effect of urban spatial form on overall economic growth,enterprises production efficiency and household consumption respectively.The dissertation also conducts mechanisms analysis of urban spatial form on enterprises production from the perspective of labor supply and firm entries and studies the channel of urban spatial form on consumers through transportation convenience and income effect.(3)Innovation of research methodsFirst,a novel instrument of urban spatial form is conducted using both historical information and geographical conditions.This instrument,the potential urban spatial form,is exogenous and highly correlated with the actual urban spatial form.It is a new method to conduct time-varing instrument of urban spatial factors.Second,GIS(Geographic Information System)is applied to economic research.The dissertation takes advantages of it in image processing and spatial analysis to obtain long-term nationwide urban graphic data and spatial attributes,thereby provides datasets for empirical analysis.Third,the dissertation studies the economic performance of urban spatial form at macro and micro levels by combining novel urban spatial form data with macro-statistical data,micro-enterprise data and micro-household data respectively.Systematic robustness tests are conducted to ensure the stability of the research results.