Geography And Services

In this paper, we used Chinese city-level panel data to examine how the distances to major ports and regional big cities affect the labor productivity of a city's tertiary industry. We found that the relationship between a city's tertiary industry labor productivity and its distance to its nearest major port showed some kind of "∽" shaped cubic curve, with the farther away from the major port, the tertiary industrial labor productivity decreases at first and then increases, and decreases at last. In contrast, the relationship between a city's secondary industry labor productivity and its distance to its nearest major port also shows a cubic curve, but there is no second peak on this curve, indicating that the centripetal force of the secondary industry is relatively stronger than the tertiary industry, but centrifugal force is relatively weaker. We also found that the effect of regional big cities on the tertiary industry labor productivity is more significant than on the secondary industry. In conclusion, the economic implication of this paper is that the spatial aggregation to the coast and around major cities is very important for the development of tertiary industry.