The Spatial Econometric Analysis On Urban Primacy And Regional Economic Growth In China

This thesis explores the relationship between urban primary and regional economic growth in the context of spatial reliance and tries to solve some related questions, such as whether there is an optimal level of urban primacy to promote the economic growth namely the inverted U curve, whether one province's urban primacy has a positive or negative effect on growth for this region and its neighboring provinces, whether there are different effects between indirect and direct, how we choose the regional strategy-leading or balanced strategy- when the government try to boost the economy, and so on.To solve the above questions, firstly this thesis calculates urban primacies of different provinces from 1989 to 2009, and analyzes the trend of urban primacy for the whole country and different provinces timely and spatially. Secondly we use the Spatial Durbin Panel Model to explore the relationship between urban primacy and regional economic growth empirically. Based on the above total effects, Thirdly we can divide it into indirect and direct effects. And lastly, we continue to test the robustness of these conclusions, and provide some related policies.This thesis gains some main conclusions: there is no empirical evidence to support the existence of optimal degree of urban primacy in China without the consideration of the spatial reliance; however when it comes to the spatial dependence among the regions,the effect of one province's urban primacy on this region is not significantly positive but on its neighboring regions significantly negatively; the indirect effects and direct effects of urban primacy on economic growth is not significantly positive and significantly negative respectively during the period of 1989 to 2009; it's beneficial to adopt the leading strategy in the short run, however it sacrifices the growth of other cities in this region and its neighbor hooding regions, the balanced strategy is more efficient to stimulate the whole province's development than leading strategy in the long run; there is a balance between short and long run for regional economic growth and the Spatial Durbin Panel Model give us more significant insights for evaluating the different policies; elevating regions' corporation, reducing barriers of knowledge spillover and boosting the central cities and coordinating the small or middle size cities are necessarily for different governments targeted policies.