Intensifying separation or collaborative prosperity? The impact of The Belt and Road Initiative on China's urban-rural integration development from a spatial justice lens

Abstract

The urban-rural relationship fundamentally represents a spatial allocation of elements. It is crucial to dismantle barriers to factor mobility to achieve urban-rural integration development (URID) for alleviating the "urban disease" or “country disease”, and fostering the equivalent development in living spaces between urban and rural residents. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), with principles of openness, inclusiveness, cooperation and sharing, has unimpeded the spatial flow of international factors and enhanced global communications and cooperation. Then, can BRI promote URID in cities along the routes? This article considers BRI as a quasi-natural experiment, employs the difference-in-difference model based on the panel data of 281 cities in China from 2011 to 2021, and empirically investigates the influence and mechanism of BRI on URID from the spatial justice lens. The results reveal that: (1) URID level in China represented an upward trend with distinct differences at the city level. (2) BRI significantly enhances URID of cities along the routes with an average increase of 0.69%, and the result is still valid after a series of robustness tests. (3) The impact of BRI on URID exhibited obvious heterogeneity, having a more significant impact on eastern and central cities, cities along both “The Belt” and “The Road”, medium-sized cities and large-sized cities. (4) Mechanism analysis indicates that BRI enhances URID through advancing opening up level, industrial upgrading and digital economy development in cities along the routes. (5) Further analysis reveals distinct positive spatial autocorrelations in URID, with BRI exerting significant positive spatial spillover effects on URID.