Study On The Influence Of FDI On Urbanization In Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration

The ’14th Five-Year Plan’ emphasizes to further advance the new type of urbanization strategy and to foster the integrated development of small,middle and large cities relying on urban clusters,which is the inevitable way to achieve high-quality economic development in China.Nowadays,urban agglomeration is becoming the staple pattern of new urbanization and the main spatial form to carry development factors,and foreign investment has proved to be an important driving force of urbanization.Under this background,it is imperative to study how the investment of multinational enterprises in China affects the urbanization of domestic urban agglomerations.This paper takes the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration,which has the largest inflow of foreign direct investment and the highest urbanization rate,as the research object,and explores the specific impact of foreign investment into the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration on its urbanization,in order to make efficient use of foreign investment to promote it’s urbanization to a new level of high-quality development,as well as to provide a reference for the development of many other urban clusters in China.Firstly,the author combs through the relevant literature at home and abroad and conduct a detailed analysis of the current situation of FDI and urbanization development in the Yangtze River Delta city cluster based on the use of authoritative theories related to international direct investment and urbanization development.Secondly,an attempt is made to map out the path of FDI’s impact on urbanization indirectly mainly through three factors: economic growth,industrial structure upgrading and labour force employment,and to formulate the research hypothesis.Then,the indicators were selected,the data of 26 cities in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration during the period of 1997-2019 were used to construct an urbanization assessment system,the entropy weight method was used to measure their urbanization levels and Moran indices(both global and local),and the Moran scatter plot and time-space transition matrix are drawn to analyze the agglomeration of urbanization level and the spatial evolution process of each city.Then the explanatory variable was determined to be the urbanization level of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomerations,the core explanatory variable was FDI(amount of actual utilization foreign investment)in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomerations,and add social fixed asset investment as control variables to construct a spatial Durbin model to empirically test the impact of actual utilization of foreign investment on the level of urbanization in the Yangtze River Delta city cluster.Lastly,this paper constructs the mediating effect model with economic growth,labor employment and industrial structure upgrading as mediator variables,and further analyze the detailed transduction channels of the influence of FDI on urbanization.The study concludes that :(1)the sources of FDI in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration are too concentrated,the distribution of the three industries is uneven,and the distribution of cities within the agglomeration is not reasonable.(2)The urbanization level of the Yangtze River Delta city cluster as a whole shows obvious spatial dependence,and the spatial agglomeration characteristics of each city are mainly of the high-high agglomeration and low-low agglomeration types,and this spatial distribution pattern always maintains a high stability,and the positive spatial spillover effect between cities is evident.(3)The inflow of foreign capital not only promotes the urbanization development of the city,but also drives the urbanization development of surrounding cities,with positive spillover effect.(4)Local economic growth,labor employment,industrial structure upgrading,improvement of openness,government support and increase of social fixed asset investment can promote the development of local urbanization,while economic growth,industrial structure upgrading and increase of social fixed asset investment will hinder the development of urbanization in neighboring cities to varying degrees.(5)Economic growth,labor employment and industrial structure upgrading have partial mediating effects in the impact of FDI on urbanization.According to the research results,countermeasures and suggestions are put forward on how to promote the urbanization of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration with high quality,including guiding the rational inflow of foreign capital,optimizing the industrial structure of the urban agglomeration,promoting the coordinated development of economic construction,improving the employment security system of labor force,improving the level of opening to the outside world and accelerating the government policy support.