City size, industrial structure and urbanization quality—A case study of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration in China
Introduction
Urbanization describes the process of rural-to-urban transformation. As a result of population migration, economic phenomena and social phenomena, it is a necessary development process for countries throughout the world. China’s urban population continues to increase: since its economic reform and opening up, the urbanization level has increased from 17.9% in 1978 to 59.5% in 2018 (NBS, 2019). However, like most big cities around the world (Foley et al., 2005, Isaksson, 2015, Romano et al., 2017), China’s urbanization has brought increasing problems such as traffic congestion, insufficient public services, extensive use of resources, environmental contamination, and urban-rural dual structure (Wang et al., 2015). Therefore, the focus on urbanization development has gradually shifted from urbanization pace to urbanization quality.
To better guide its urbanization, China’s National Development and Reform Commission put forward the “National New-type Urbanization Plan (2014–2020)” (hereafter referred to as “Plan 2014–2020”) in March 2014 (China’s National Development and Reform Commission, 2014). It stated that the goal of urbanization development was “to comprehensively improve the quality of new urbanization,” pointing out that “the level of new urbanization development should be consistent with the transformation of industrial structure, new employment opportunities, the ability of cities and towns to absorb rural population, and natural resources and environmental carrying capacity.” At the same time, the “Plan 2014–2020″ proposed “strictly controlling the size of cities with an urban population greater than 5 million.” According to the population of permanent residents in urban areas, cities in China are divided into five categories, including small cities (<0.5 million people), medium-sized cities (>0.5–1 million people), big cities (>1–5 million people), mega cities (>5–10 million people), and super mega cities (>10 million) (Wang et al., 2015). In China, the size structure of cities shows a “Pyramid” pattern, which means that the number of big and middle-sized cities is small, while the number of small cities is large (Anderson and Ge, 2005, Wan et al., 2017).
Friedmann (2006) points out that the disparity in city size will lead to great inconsistency between the quality of space development in urbanization and the quality of social development. Some scholars argue that resource allocation efficiency, productivity and employment rate increase with city population (Guo et al., 2019, Glaeser and Resseger, 2010, Lu et al., 2012). While others worry about the impacts of large-scale population on cities systems, such as urban unemployment, environmental pollution, habitat and biodiversity loss, and the pressure of public services (Gaigne and Sanch-Maritan, 2019, Fragkias et al., 2013, Seto et al., 2012, York, 2007). Therefore, although the expansion of the urban population has brought “scale effects” to city development, its “crowding effects” should not be ignored.
Urbanization, as an important driving force of economic development in a country or region, is closely related to the industrial system and industrial structure (Borck et al., 2010). To better understand industrial structure, existing studies have viewed it from two dimensions: the rationalization of industrial structure and the upgrading of industrial structure. Industrial structure rationalization implies the allocation, coordination and utilization efficiency of production elements among industries (Kuznets, 1957, Greunz, 2004). The more reasonable the industrial structure is, the more optimized the resource allocation, and the higher the utilization rate of production elements, which contribute to enterprises’ profits and their scale expansion, so as to promote employment and increase the urbanization rate (Wu et al., 2018). While the upgrading of industrial structure pays more attention to labor productivity, it focuses on the transformation of industries from labor-intensive to capital-intensive and knowledge-technology-intensive (Shen, 2013, Han et al., 2017). With transformation of industrial structure from agriculture-led to manufacturing-led and modern services-led, the productivity increases (Davis, Henderson, 2003), the functions of city management and public services are improved and optimized (Wu et al., 2018), thus promote the level of urbanization.
Urbanization is a series of socio-spatial processes, and urbanization quality is a multi-dimension concept (Davis, Henderson, 2003), which reflects the pros and cons of urbanization by measuring the level of socio-economic development, the coordination development between urban and rural areas, as well as the degree of harmony between man and nature. In the existing literature, the relationship between city size and one dimension of urbanization, such as economy increase, employment rate, and the environment of human settlements has been explored. However, the impact of city size on urbanization quality, including population, economy, society, land, ecological environment, and urban and rural co-ordination, has not yet been studied further. Meanwhile, it is believed that as the city population expands, the proportion of service industries increases, while the proportion of manufacturing decreases (Henderson, 1997). The change of industrial structure along with the expansion of city size are often important forms that appear simultaneously in the process of urbanization. Therefore, are there size-structure synergy effects on urbanization quality? With such concern on mind, in theory, this paper discuss the relationship between city size, industrial structure and urbanization quality; Between 2005 and 2010, more than 80% of China’s rural emigrants moved to cities, and were mainly concentrated in three urban agglomerations: Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, and Pearl River Delta (Wang, 2019). Therefore, empirically, taking the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration (YDRUA) as an example, this paper starts with comprehensively measure urbanization quality with entropy method and panel data of cities within the YDRUA (2008–2017), then uses the panel data regression to discuss the impacts of city size and industrial structure on the quality of urbanization, and observe the interaction effects between city size and industrial structure on urbanization quality. Finally, some policy implications were proposed to promote the improvement of urbanization quality in urban agglomerations, with a view to providing a reference model for urbanization development in the rest areas of China and other developing countries.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we analyze the relationship and interaction mechanism between city size, industrial structure, and urbanization quality at the theoretical level, and then put forward two hypotheses. Section 3 introduces the research methods, core variables, and data sets that are used for the empirical analysis. Section 4 describes the results of empirical analysis to explain the relationship and interaction mechanism between city size, industrial structure, and urbanization quality, and then tests the two hypotheses. Conclusions and policy implications are discussed in the final Section.
Section snippets
Theory analyses
Compared with rural areas, urban areas have advantages in terms of employment opportunities, innovation and public services (Gaigne and Sanch-Maritan, 2019, Rosenthal and Strange, 2004, Sun et al., 2014). Therefore, a large number of migrants choose to move and settle in urban areas, which drives the expansion of city size. At the early stage, the “scale effect,” brought about by the expansion of city size, enhances the quality of urbanization. Specifically, the productivity increases with
The study area
The YRDUA, as an important intersection of the “Belt and Road” and the Yangtze River Economic Belt, has a developed economy, intensive urban cities and large populations. Following from the YRDUA development plan announced by the Chinese government in 2016, there were 26 cities (Table 1), including one super mega city, one mega city, 13 big cities, 7 middle-sized cities, and four small cities in YRDUA. In 2017, the population was 162.7million in this area, and the urbanization level of the
Empirical result analysis
In this section, urbanization quality is measured with the entropy-weighting method, and results from the estimation of Eq. (2)(3), (4) are presented. In Table 4, we empirically analyze the impact of city size and industrial structure on the quality of urbanization, which are respectively recorded as Model 1(M1) and Model 2(M2). In Model 3(M3), the interaction term between city size and industrial structure is taken into consideration, which is shown in Table 5. In both tables,
Conclusions and policy implications
In China, urbanization shows its shortcomings, such as extensive growth at the expense of land resources and “urban diseases” (Wang et al., 2015). In 2014, Plan 2014–2020 was carried out to guide a high-quality urbanization. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of city size and industrial structure on the quality of urbanization. Firstly, from the six dimensions of population, economy, society, land, ecological environment, as well as the integrated development of urban and rural
Author statement
This manuscript has not been published or presented elsewhere in part or in entirety and is not under consideration by another journal. We have read and understood your journal’s policies, and we believe that neither the manuscript nor the study violates any of these. There are no conflicts of interest to declare.
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