地方政府竞争下的区域产业布局

Regional Industrial Distribution under Local Government Competition

地方政府竞争对不同行政区域的产业布局会产生何种影响?以Young(2000)为代表的主流文献大多基于"地方政府竞争→市场分割→地区产业同构"的理论逻辑,通过测量区域之间产业结构相似度的时间趋势来反推地方政府竞争及市场分割的强弱。本文认为,由于缺乏"无分割状态"下区域产业布局的对照组,使得这种以"时间趋势法"为识别策略的研究范式无法在时间截面上提供直接的事实依据,而只能在事先假定地区分割导致产业同构的基础之上,借助产业结构相似度的变化趋势来判断地区分割程度。这不仅陷入了前提和结论之间循环推证的逻辑窘境,而且很容易将经济体系中某种内在力量引起的各地区产业结构的共同变化趋势,错误地归咎于行政区域之间的市场分割。为了纠正现有研究范式和结论的偏差,本文利用中国省际分界线两侧城市的空间近邻特征构造了自然实验,真正析出了行政区割效应对地区产业布局的影响。一个颠覆性的结论是:省际分界线的存在显著扩大了跨省相邻的城市之间产业结构的差异程度,这意味着在地方政府竞争格局下,区域产业布局非但没有走向同构,反而通过特色产业政策强化了地区分工,促进了"行政区域专业化"的形成。

Does the competition among local governments necessarily lead to the"similarity"of regional industrial structure?Young(QJE,2000)argued that the incremental reform in China not only facilitated the government intervention in the market,but also motivated local governments to be profit-seeking and led to fierce competition among regions.To obtain more economic benefits and hidden political benefits,local governments promote local industrial development by allocating production factors and scarce resources to industries with higher returns,and protect local markets by market segmentation,which weakened the degree of regional specialization and led to the"similarity"of regional industrial structure.Since the pioneering work of Young(2000),many studies follow up on this problem.However,the results are rather mixed and even quite the opposite under different industry classification,though using the same research method(Bai et al.,2004 a,2004 b;Holz,2009).While the ongoing academic controversy and intense debate mainly concern about the industrial classification or databases,few scholars have taken different views and doubt the rationality of the research paradigm,except for Holz(2009).Logically,if it is believed that industrial structures are similar among"administrative regions,"they will be more similar at any time among different administrative regions with market segmentation than those without market segmentation.In other words,the control group of regions without market segmentation is needed to confirm the existing conclusions.The fundamental flaw of the identification strategy in current research is the lack of an effective control group,for which the degree of segmentation can only be computed by analyzing the time trend of industrial structure similarity among regions,based on the implicit assumption of regional segmentation,thus falling into a logical trap and circular argument.To falsify the"time trend method"applied in the existing literature,we randomly reconstructed 30"virtual provinces"based on the initials of more than 300 cities in China,and then calculated the differences and changing trends in industrial structure among these"virtual provinces",applying the typical methods of representative papers.We find that the differences of the changing trend in industrial structure among randomly constructed"virtual provinces"are highly consistent with those among real provinces,which indicates that the so-called"similarity"of industrial structure in the mainstream literature is not caused by inter-provincial market segmentation,but may be from some consistent changing trend in inter-regional industrial structure.We then designed a quasi-natural experiment to explore the impacts of institutional factors under local government competition on regional industrial structure,based on the large-sample data of Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database from 2000 to 2013.We compared the differences in industrial structure between cities on different sides of the provincial boundary and those on the same side of the provincial boundary.We come to quite the opposite conclusion that the regional segmentation caused by provincial boundaries,at some point in time,makes the industrial structure significantly different instead of similar among adjacent provinces,comparing with the control group without inter-provincial segmentation.We argue that the government intervention in industrial structure under local government competition,which aims at higher economic growth and fiscal revenue,will not lead to rat race and the"similarity"of industrial structure among different administrative regions.On the contrary,local governments contribute to the differentiation of industries and ultimately the specialization in the administrative region by implementing differentiated industrial policies.What is more,the"specialization in the administrative region"we proposed in this paper is substantively different from the"regional specialization"in general.The"specialization in the administrative region"is the result of the government intervention in production factors,while the"regional specialization"suggests the"division of labor under natural conditions"in the market-oriented allocation of production factors.