County-to-District Reform,Land Finance And Urban Sprawl

The adjustment of administrative regions is a powerful tool for the central government to drive urbanization.Whether the government-led policy of withdrawing counties and establishing districts promotes the improvement of urbanization quality remains to be empirically tested.This paper studies the reformation of withdrawing counties and establishing districts during 2000 to 2013,and it verifies that withdrawing counties and establishing districts’ impact on the quality of urbanization and economic growth,based on the night satellite lighting data.The study finds that,withdrawing counties and establishing districts effectively promotes the urbanization process in general,but leads to the outward-expanding urban sprawl with low density and low quality,and significantly reduces the average light intensity in urban areas.In the heterogeneous analysis,it finds that,after withdrawing counties and establishing districts,the phenomenon of urban sprawl is the most obvious and the average light intensity decreases the most in medium-sized cities,besides,it even leads to a significant increase in area of ghost town in small cities.In the further mechanism analysis,it discusses the motivation and integration cost of withdrawing county and establishing district.Research shows that withdrawing counties and establishing districts significantly promotes the increase of area and land transfer income in the region,in addition,with the implementation of this policy,the land fiscal dependency increased significantly in this region.It illustrates that the cities,implementing the policy,have the motivation to obtain more land transfer income by withdrawing counties and establishing districts.On the one hand,it can make up the fiscal gap of local government and relieve the fiscal pressure of local government,on the other hand,it can transform the land fiscal income into the preferential policies for investment in infrastructure construction and investment promotion in order to promote economic growth.However,the development mode driven by land factors leads to the imbalance of land urbanization and population urbanization,which means the land urbanization is far faster than population urbanization,thus it leads to the phenomenon of urban sprawl and reduces the average light intensity of the merged cities.In the further heterogeneity analysis,this kind of land fiscal phenomenon is particularly obvious in medium-sized cities,leading to a definite increase in its dependence on land finance.Meanwhile,there is still a large integration cost in County-to-district reform.The more times it implements,the more intensity it has,the higher integration cost it gets accordingly.This kind of extensive growth mode led by the government does not promote economic development very well.Using land element expansion to promote economy is not beneficial to the cities’ sustainable and better development.At last,through the data test of micro industrial enterprises,this paper finds that County-to-district reform significantly reduces the enterprises’ total factor productivity.It shows that withdrawing counties and establishing districts does not give full play to the agglomeration economic benefits,resulting in resource mismatch to a certain extent.