| The establishment of Chinese development zones has experienced more than thirty years and it has undergone a shift from the eastern priority to a balanced regional development.Initially,the development zones were established in the eastern coastal cities,later expanded to the central and western provinces.The number of zones continued to increase,and the gap of economic benefits among zones gradually widened.In response to the chaos caused by rapid expansion in "development zone fever",the country issued policies to clean up and rectify for several times,especially for the rectification project among 2004-2006.Now the construction of the development zone has entered a period of steady growth,the realization of a benign interaction between the development zone and the regional economy,the integration of industry and city,and the improvement of overall economic benefits are the development goals at this stage.Existing literature mostly studies the micro-mechanism influence between the development zone and the enterprise,and lacks more discussion on the economic effect of development zones from the perspective of the overall regional economic development.The rectification policy has a far-reaching impact on the development zone construction history,but the research on effectiveness of the project is limited.From the perspective of regional economy,this article focuses on the theoretical analysis and empirical test of the relationship between the development zone and regional economic development from both macro and micro aspects.According to the theoretical analysis,development zone’s impact on the regional economy is mainly manifested in five aspects: capital investment,trade export,corporate behavior,production efficiency,employment and salary.The role stems from the following three aspects.First,the development zone’s policy preferences,institutional innovation and the trickle-down effect on the mother city effectively attract high-quality production factors and expand trade exports;Second,industrial agglomeration increases the number of enterprises in the region and improves the production capacity of enterprises.Third,spatial diffusion and the benign competitive relationship with the mother city increase the development zone’s spillover effect of advanced knowledge and technology,which enhances regional production efficiency.The empirical part of this paper builds a database containing 268 prefecture-level cities’ economic indicators and development zone information,which is used to test the impact of establishment policy and rectification project of development zones on the five indicators of regional economy.The study finds that: First,the development zone greatly promotes foreign direct investment and export trade volume,improving regional production efficiency,attracting enterprises to settle in thus expanding output and increasing employment,but the development zone has no significant impact on actual wage level.Second,there is heterogeneity in the regional economic effects of development zone’s policies.The economic benefits of early established zones are better than those of the later,considering the impact of resource endowment and market mechanism differences on the spillover effect of the development zone change;the national development zone has a more significant economic creation effect than the provincial development zone,which comes from the more significant spillover effect of national zones arising from development gap between areas within and out of the national zone;the increase in the number of national development zones further strengthens the agglomeration effect,but the continuing increase of provincial development zones is not conducive to further improve regional production efficiency.Because the cost effect of congestion caused by too many local-level development zones may distort corporate behavior.Excessive addition of local-level development zones will also lead to the phenomenon of ―false industrial agglomeration‖,which is low efficiency of resource allocation and unfavorable to regional economic development.Third,rectification projects efffectively controlled the agglomeration cost effect,thus improving the development zone ’s impact on the regional economic development.However,the short-term impact of cancellation policy is negative,for it deprives policy preferences enjoyed by the region at the same time.Considering the endogenous issues of empirical exploration,this paper uses urban characteristics to match cities between the experimental and control group with similar economic foundations to test the robustness of empirical results,which is proved to be consistent.Discussions on the effectiveness of development zone construction from the perspective of regional economy further clarify the relationship between development zone construction and regional economic development,which provides theoretical basis for policies implemented to achieve coordinated and simultaneous development of development zones and regional economies.In addition,the rectification project research in this paper further fills the blank in the relevant empirical research. |
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