Urban Spatial Structure And Economic Growth

All along, the mainstream economists tend to ignore the importance of spatial factors in the study of economic problems, for the reason that they can’t model the spatial factors. However, in the real study, many economic problems will be difficult to get the desired answers, if the importance of spatial factors is neglected. Hence, since the1990s, Paul Krugman as the representative of mainstream economists has re-examined the importance of spatial factors, and tried to incorporate them into economic models. Accordingly, the spatial structures of agglomeration have attracted wide attention. Currently, a lot of papers researched on spatial structures-between agglomeration and economic growth, with no uniform opinions, nonetheless, most studies tended to support that the agglomeration is conducive to promoting economic growth, which was verified by the rapid growth of cities from home and abroad. Based on the presence of agglomeration economies, the size of cities increases to get the economies of scale, simultaneously, a number of urban diseases gradually exposed. Therefore, the criticism on agglomeration economies increased in academia and even some scholars’study results showed that the urban agglomeration can’t promote economic growth. Clearly, there are still a lot of confusion in current research on urban spatial structure and economic growth, so it is necessary and significant to study the relationship between them systematically, and it can also provide theory support for spatial development strategy of Chinese cities.Based on the results of previous studies, and in view of its shortcomings, this study will define the spatial structure as agglomeration and dispersion broadly. Admittedly, whether size, density, or gravity all belong to one kind of representation of spatial structure, while can not generalize the whole urban spatial structure in the true sense, which reflects only a small part. Therefore, this part will qualified the indicators of spatial structure comprehensively as possible, and try to present a more objective performance status of urban spatial development, which is an innovation of this study differs from previous studies. Worthy of attention, because of the different emphases of the spatial indicators,the results of the analysis will inevitably be different, but not contradictory.This paper is divided into six parts:Introduction part mainly describes the background and significance of the study, as well as the analytical frameworks and innovation. The second part reviews the major theories and research findings, including studying on the relationship between agglomeration and economic growth, exploration the optimal city size problem, and problems of building the spatial structure indexes. The third and fourth parts is the empirical research which is the main part of this paper. Based on the cities of China, from both urban district and city territory, this paper constructs urban spatial structure indicators, and applies econometric methods to analyze the relationship between agglomeration, dispersion and economic growth. The fifth part discusses the formation mechanism of agglomeration and dispersion. The sixth part is conclusions and outlook studies.The results show that for the urban district, the relative dispersion of the spatial structure is more conducive to economic growth, but the economies of scale still exists in the whole cities; for the city territory, the relative agglomeration of the spatial structure is more conducive to economic growth, but for the developed region, both agglomeration and dispersion...