The Economic Validity Of Renaming Cities Empirical Test

After the reform and opening up,our country has raised the socialist modernization construction to the national focal point,and the status of economic growth has been unprecedented enhanced.The indicators of good political performance have gradually become the speed of economic growth,and the economic competition among different regions has become more and more fierce.In this process,there have been some cases of rapid economic development of individual cities after city renaming,which has led some cities in China to use city names to obtain new economic growth modes.Urban renaming emerged as a rapid way to get attention,and once developed into a nationwide upsurge of urban renaming.For example,the former Dayong City was renamed as Zhangjiajie City(Hunan,1994),the former Puqi City was renamed as Chibi City(Hubei,1998),and the former Xiangfan City was renamed as Xiangyang City(Hubei,2010),etc.The phenomenon of city renaming emerged in endlessly,and even once it became a hot issue in real life.Up to now,there are still many urban areas with the idea of changing the name of the city.City name is the production of naming a city in order to distinguish and manage the city better.The city name is the most important and prominent symbol of a city.Unlike people’s names,city names have a certain nature of public goods,which are shared by people in the areas covered by city names,and have very complex meanings and extremely important roles.There are many reasons for city renaming,but the most important reason for city renaming is to rely on City renaming to seek new channels of economic growth.The so-called "great success" of Zhangjiajie has attracted a large number of cities eager to copy the success of Zhangjiajie through city renaming.As a result,many regions began to carry out city renaming,which once caused a very chaotic situation of city renaming.Since the reform and opening up(December 2017),there are as many as 208 renamed urban areas in China,which are characterized by universality,chaos and profit-seeking.Urban renaming is undoubtedly an administrative measure of the central or regional governments.As a policy formulated by local governments to stimulate local economic growth,like other policy measures,it naturally has corresponding policy effects.In some cities,urban renaming indeed accelerates local economic growth,but in other cities,its policy effects are not satisfactory.However,few people evaluate thepolicy effect of such a policy.Therefore,this paper will use the common method of policy measurement-double difference method to evaluate the policy effect of urban renaming,so as to objectively analyze the economic effectiveness of urban renaming.This paper evaluates the effect of renaming cities from three aspects: the growth rate of per capita GDP,the growth rate of per capita investment in fixed assets and the growth rate of per capita consumption level.Based on the empirical results,this paper gives some suggestions on this hot social issue.