中国城市规模之谜:一个综合分析框架

The Puzzles of Chinese City Size: A Comprehensive Analytical Framework

如何缓解“大城市病”,发挥城市集聚的规模经济效应,减少规模不经济的负效应,是长期困扰学术界的难题。为解决这一难题,迫切需要一个兼顾城市集聚的经济增长、交通拥挤和环境污染三重效应的综合分析框架,本文在这方面进行探索,讨论中国城市化进程中的三点争论。总的来看,中国城市规模普遍偏小,继续推进城市化进程十分有必要,但测算结果也表明,北京和上海的城市规模已经偏大,因此中国城市规模偏小的结论不适用于超大城市;中国存在城市发展不平衡现象,可能的原因是在过去城市化进程中地方政府热衷于追求经济总量目标而忽视了人均效用水平;出于全社会人均效用最大化的考虑,中小城市应在一定程度上优先发展;从具体的城市政策来看,中小城市应更多地使用产业政策来提升人口承载能力,特大城市和超大城市应注重对环境质量和交通状况的改善,而户籍政策应当有松有紧、慎重使用。

How to alleviate the“metropolitan malaise”,maximize the scale economies of urban agglomeration,and reduce the scale diseconomies of urban agglomeration,is an important issue in academia.To solve this issue,there is an urgent need for a comprehensive analytical framework,which takes into account the economic growth,environmental pollution,and traffic congestion effects of urban agglomeration.This paper performs a study about this aspect,as well as answers three common puzzles of Chinese urbanization.Overall,most Chinese cities are undersized,so it is necessary to further promote the urbanization process,but it doesn’t mean that all the first-tier cities should be encouraged to agglomerate because Beijing and Shanghai have been oversized.Urban development imbalance exists in China,a possible reason is that local governments,in the past urbanization process,were keen to pursue the aggregate economy but ignored the per capita utility.To maximize per capita utility in the whole society,the small and medium-sized cities should be given priority to develop.As for urban policies,the small and medium-sized cities should use industrial policies to improve their population-carrying capacity,while the large cities should pay more attention to the improvement of environmental quality and traffic condition,and household registration policies should be used carefully.