文化多样性会阻滞城镇化进程吗?——基于方言视角的经验考察

Cultural diversity and urbanization rate: a dialects-based study

基于2000-2012年中国276个地级及以上城市的数据样本,以方言多样性代理度量文化多样性,采用随机效应模型、系统广义矩估计、两阶段最小二乘法等方法,首次就文化多样性对中国城镇化的影响进行了经验考察。研究发现,方言多样性对城镇化率具有显著的负向影响;在考虑存在遗漏变量的可能而引入滞后一期的城镇化率作为解释变量后,方言多样性对城镇化率的影响依然显著为负;在采用历史外来人口迁入作为方言多样性的工具变量后,这种负向影响仍然显著存在,但影响程度有所下降。因此,以方言为代表的文化变量是影响城镇化进程的一个重要因素。

Using the 2000-2012 panel data of 276 Chinese cities,we study the influence of cultural diversity on urbanization rate with dialects as a proxy variable.We employ three econometric methods of random effect model,system GMM,and 2SLS.We have the following results.The diversity of dialects has a significant negative effect on urbanization rate after we control a series of variables.To prevent the omitted variable problem,we introduce the first-order urbanization as the independent variable and find that the effect of dialect diversity on urbanization rate is still significantly negative.Using whether there was immigration in history as the instrumental variable of dialect diversity,we find that the influence is still significantly negative though it declines to some extent.The results indicate that cultural factors such as dialects are a significant factor in China’s urbanization rate.