Diversification, Specialization And Urban Agglomerative Economies Of Yangtze River Delta Urban

With China's accelerating urbanization process and the evolvement of global economic pattern, the situation of urban agglomerating economy increasingly been concerned about. Under the view of new economic geography framework in this paper, we use panel data of 25 cities in the Yangtze River Delta region from 1997 to 2006, using and calculating the relative specialization index and relative diversity index to inspect the specialization and diversity characteristics of cities in Yangtze River Delta, and making theoretical and empirical research about how specialization and diversification promoting city agglomerative economies as well as their relative contributions to the agglomeration economies.The main conclusions of this paper are: (1) in the last ten years, the average index of relative specialization and diversity of cities in Yangtze River Delta is rising, indicating that there is a overall increase in the level of city agglomeration in the region of Yangtze River Delta in recent years; meanwhile, this article makes comparative analysis about the Yangtze River Delta and the core region of Yangtze River Delta, and we finds the degree of specialization and diversification is increasing more obviously in the region of the core of the Yangtze River Delta, and degree of specialization and diversification of the 16 cities in that region is more higher; compared with the developed countries , the overall index of the relative diversity and specialization index about the cities in Yangtze River Delta is obviously on the low side. (2) According to empirical results, at this stage in the region of the Yangtze River Delta specialization enhances urban agglomerative economy more, and the core region of the Yangtze River Delta benefits more from specialization than the region of Yangtze River Delta as a whole; we don't get the results about the diversification promoting agglomeration, indicating that at present the urban agglomeration in the region of Yangtze River Delta mainly rely on specialization rather than diversification. (3) Good urban infrastructure, human capital advantage and positive funding and technical externalities can promote urban agglomeration.