走向大中小城市协调发展的中国新型城镇化格局——建国以来中国城市规模分布演化与影响因素

China's new pattern of urbanization toward coordinated development of large, medium and small cities: Evolution and determinants of city size distribution since 1949

为了落实国家新型城镇化规划提出的大中小城市协调发展战略,对1952-2014年中国城市规模分布指数进行演化分析,并在时间序列分析基础上探索了影响因素。结果表明,2000年以来,中国城市规模分布一改长期的分散化趋势,正走向集中化;人口规模增长、政策干预以及城市之间信息和交通成本的节约,都促使城市规模分布分散化;人均GDP长期以来促进了城市规模分布的集中,但近年来开始促进分散化;对外开放水平则主要促进分布的集中。未来应以全国适度均衡发展作为指导方针;远期以市场一体化,近期以共赢互利机制建设为抓手,促进城市群内大中小城市协调分工,优势互补;注意政策的稳定性和长期性,减少城市化格局的人为波动。

After reviewing the literature on city size distribution as well as on its determinants,this paper measures China’s city size distribution from 1952 to 2014 based on the rank-size method and explores its evolution trend. Then, we empirically examine which factors and how they determine China’s city size distribution to test different hypotheses in previous literature and give a comprehensive explanation of the mechanism of China’s city size distribution using the time series analysis. We conclude with policy implications for improving China’s city size distribution. The results show that:(1) The city size distribution of Chinese cities follows a power-law, and its evolution shows a decentralized or flattering trend from the 1950 s to 2000 and turns to centralization after that;(2) The increase of population size, policy intervention and the reduction of information and transportation costs among cities result in the decentralization of city size distribution;(3) Per capita GDP has a significant U-shaped relationship with city size distribution, that is, the increasing economic development level had led to the centralization of city size distribution at first, but began to bring the decentralization as a result in recent years;(4) The economic openness to the world has promoted the polarization of city size distribution, likely through benefiting large cities more. The urbanization strategies of China in future should 1) aim at keeping an reasonably balanced city size distribution to address the overdevelopment of large cities and the underdevelopment of medium-and small-sized cities;2) promote coordinated and complementary development of large-, medium-and small-sized cities by developing market integration mechanism in a long period and a mutual benefit strategy in the transition period, based on large urban clusters and city regions centered on large cities;3) make suggestions to the governments at all levels in regulating the national city size distribution, while paying attention to the stability of policy to reduce the frequent and artificial fluctuations of the urbanization process.