中国区位导向性政策有效吗?——来自开发区的证据

Are Place-Based Policies Effective? Evidence from China's Development Zones

中国的开发区是改革开放的前沿窗口和区域发展的引擎,也是服务于国家经济发展战略的重要载体。文章以开发区政策为例,利用2003年开发区清理整顿政策这一准自然实验,使用倾向得分匹配倍差方法(PSM-DID)评估了中国区位导向性政策的有效性和空间异质性。研究发现:(1)短期来看,开发区政策促进地区经济总量缩小差距的作用非常显著,但是长期效应不明显;而对人均意义上的经济增长及其缩小区域差距的作用,在短期和长期均不明显。(2)开发区政策的作用存在地理异质性,推动了中西部地区GDP的相对更快增长,但对人均GDP提升的作用不显著。进一步的分析显示,开发区政策的作用在距离城市群300公里内更加明显,其正向效果随着城市到城市群的距离的增加而减弱。(3)开发区设立有利于提升所在城市的第三产业比重,但对基础设施和和教育状况的改善没有带来显著的促进作用。结果表明,单纯依赖区位导向的空间干预政策无法兼顾总量平衡与人均GDP的均衡发展。因此,中国区域协调发展战略的重点不应是通过分散布局的干预以达到总量意义上的地区平衡,而应把重心放在提升落后地区的基础设施、教育质量和民生方面,并强化城市群和都市圈作为实施区域政策的有力抓手,最终实现基本公共服务的区际均等化。

Xi Jinping’s report to the 19 th CPC National Congress expounded the implementation of the regional coordinated development strategy for the first time,which is a significant improvement in China’s regional development strategy since the reform and opening up policy.The imbalance of China’s regional development reflects the conflicts between people’s growing needs for a better life and the imbalanced regional development in terms of the spatial distribution of economic activities,and has always been one of the major difficulties in China’s economic and social development.As a typical "place-based" policy,the significance of the development zone has gone beyond the development zone itself and become an important carrier to serve the national economic development strategy.Based on the panel data of prefecture-level cities from2000-2015,this paper takes the cleaning up and rectifying policy of development zones in 2003 as a quasinatural experiment and adopts the difference-in-differences propensity score matching method to estimate the impact of the "place-based" policy on regional economic development.It comes to the results as follows:the cleaning up and rectifying policy of development zones has significantly reduced regional disparity,but not significantly affected regional disparities at the per capita level.Meanwhile,the cleaning up and rectifying policy of development zones has significantly reduced regional economic growth,which in another way means the setting up of development zones has indeed promoted regional economic growth.Also it has not significantly affected regional disparities at the per capita level.On these grounds,it can be concluded that,under the circumstance of insufficient mobility of production factors,the balance of regional development at the aggregate level has been achieved through the transfer of resources and the regional preferential policies,but the regional balance at the per capita level has not been achieved.The sub-region test shows that the impact is more significant for the central and western areas but not significant for the eastern areas when it comes to the aggregate economic growth,implying that the development of the central and western may be balanced at the expense of losing efficiency in the eastern.Furthermore,cities with development zones which are within 300 km from the urban agglomeration are more advantageous than those beyond 300 km from the urban agglomeration.The heterogeneity test of metropolitan areas shows that the cleaning up and rectifying policy of the Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region has greater effects on economic growth,while that of the Pearl River Delta has less effects.Therefore,the urban agglomeration and metropolitan area should be strengthened as a key to implement the "place-based" policy.By optimizing the rational layout of development zones,it will help to boost economic growth in less developed areas and narrow the gap of economic development between developed areas and less developed areas.Besides,by improving the basic public service level in the central and western areas,the loss of balance and efficiency can be avoided to some extent,thus realizing regional prosperity.