Growth and Change最新文献

According to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), lower land use efficiency may pose challenges to achieving sustainable development. We exploit the reform of the construction land approval authority in China, which grants local governments greater autonomy in land use decisions. Using large-scale socioeconomic, land transfer, and nighttime light data, we constructed two complementary indicators to measure the quality and scale of urban land use efficiency (ULUE): land output efficiency (LOE) and land scale efficiency (LSE). We draw the following main conclusions: expanded autonomy in land approval significantly improves ULUE. The policy effects of the reform on different types of ULUE vary in cities with different levels of land demand, land marketization development, and industrial agglomeration. The reform primarily improves ULUE, especially LOE, by reshaping land allocation strategies that promote the use of stock land and increase land value, and by encouraging industrial development strategies that facilitate the growth of producer services and digital industries. These findings highlight the importance of administrative decentralization and land approval reforms in shaping land allocation and suggest that policymakers should carefully consider how relaxing land regulations influences local government decisions.

Although numerous studies have examined the role of industrial agglomeration in regional innovation, limited research has investigated the impact of industrial agglomeration on firms' innovation. Therefore, using a novel dataset that merges data from 2772 manufacturing firms in 2015 with 51 Shanghai industrial zones-level data, this study investigates how two distinct types of industrial agglomeration influence firms' innovation performance from a non-linear perspective. Our findings reveal a U-shaped relationship between diversification agglomeration and firms' innovation performance: initially, its performance declines as the intensity of diversification agglomeration increases, but beyond a threshold, it rises with further intensification. In contrast, specialization agglomeration exhibits a consistently positive relationship with firms' innovation performance. Moreover, our results demonstrate that the critical role of specialization agglomeration for the innovation performance of firms in low- and medium technology industries, while highlighting that diversification agglomeration is more beneficial to enhance the innovation performance of firms in high-technology industries. Based on these insights, this paper provides important policy implications for promoting the sustainable development of Chinese industrial zones.

Key digital technology (KDT) serves as a critical technological foundation for advancing pollution reduction and carbon mitigation (PRCM), while increasingly reshaping regional environmental governance capacity. However, the institutional fluctuations and governance uncertainties induced by intensifying climate risks have introduced both challenges and opportunities for the environmental effectiveness of KDT. Drawing on panel data from 276 prefecture-level cities in China between 2011 and 2021, this study investigates the impact of KDT on PRCM synergy across heterogeneous regional contexts. The findings reveal that KDT significantly enhances the degree of PRCM synergy, highlighting its dual environmental benefits. Moreover, climate risks play differentiated moderating roles in this process. Specifically, climate transition risks amplify the PRCM effect of KDT, reflecting the greater marginal adaptability of technological governance under institutional risk scenarios. In contrast, the overall moderating role of climate physical risks is limited. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that under transition risks, KDT possesses compensatory capacities to address institutional uncertainty, whereas under physical risks, its effectiveness is conditioned by regional structural characteristics and governance capacity. Mechanism analysis further demonstrates that KDT influences PRCM synergy through a chain pathway encompassing “source prevention–process control–end-stage blocking.” Spatial effect analysis indicates a siphon effect of KDT, with significant negative spillovers on the PRCM synergy of adjacent regions, implying the risk of widening inter-regional disparities in environmental governance outcomes.

Urban primacy has significantly increased in some advanced countries during the process of urbanization, potentially hindering economic growth. This paper empirically examines the relationships between urban concentration and economic growth. Using fixed effects (FE) estimations with OECD country panel data, we find that increased urban concentration within non-primary cities can promote national economic growth, potentially by mitigating excessive urban primacy—the disproportionate concentration of economic activity in the largest city. These findings suggest that in countries with high urban primacy, policies focused on fostering the development of relatively large second-tier cities can effectively address excessive urban primacy and support more balanced growth.

This study investigates whether high-tech innovation stimulates innovation in traditional fields across US metropolitan regions between 1996 and 2014. Existing theory emphasizes that innovation unfolds differently in high-tech versus low- and medium-tech industries, while a common view among stakeholders portrays technological progress as a linear shift from traditional to high-tech fields. Utilizing USPTO patent data and technological classifications, this study examines whether regions strong in high-tech fields also experience growth in patenting within non-high-tech industries. The findings indicate that metropolitan regions with higher levels of high-tech patenting in 1996–2000 subsequently exhibited more patenting in traditional fields in 2010–2014, with effects varying across industries. The analysis further suggests that regional innovation in traditional fields is predominantly shaped by path dependency, with high-tech innovation serving a more complementary role. Overall, the study highlights a symbiotic—rather than unidirectional—relationship between traditional and high-tech innovation.

The stability of housing prices is crucial to both macroeconomic stability and people's livelihoods. In order to explore the root causes of the decline in China's real estate prices and formulate targeted policies for stabilizing housing prices, this study adopts a configuration perspective and employs the fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) method. Taking the housing price changes of 267 prefecture-level cities in China from 2021 to 2023 as the research object, this paper identifies the key combined paths influencing the downward trend of housing prices. The research findings reveal four core configuration paths for housing price decline: cost relief type, cost reduction adaptation type, supply-demand contraction type, and supply-demand recession type. All four paths include a high decline rate of land prices, indicating that the decrease in land prices serves as a critical foundational condition for the decline in housing prices. The interaction between the supply and demand sides determines the market mechanism underlying the housing price decline: when demand is strong, the supply side proactively adjusts its structure and reduces costs by leveraging the decrease in land costs to achieve active price adjustment; when demand is weak, the supply side is forced into passive price discounts due to inventory backlogs and capital chain pressures. Financial support, functioning as a lubricant, amplifies elasticity on the demand side and mitigates risks on the supply side, yet it cannot reverse the fundamental trends of demand recession and supply clearance.

By combining the city attribute data of sectoral employment in producer service and manufacturing and the intercity interaction data of population travel, internet, and patent cooperation from 2015 to 2019, the improved functional complementarity between core cities and their peripheral cities is measured. Using physical distance and expressway length as proxies for intercity distance, the analysis investigates the impact of intercity distance on functional complementarity by taking 11 Chinese megaregions as cases. The empirical results show that: (1) Intercity complementarity decreases with increasing intercity distance. (2) Considering intercity interaction in the measurements reveals the greater sensitivity of intercity functional complementarity to distance. (3) The negative effect of the distance becomes increasingly important over time if the interaction is highly sensitive to distance. (4) Among the sectors examined, leasing and business services show the weakest sensitivity to intercity distance while transportation services exhibit the most sensitivity. Our research emphasizes the significance of intercity distance on intercity functional relations in urban systems.

While evolutionary economic geography has documented path-dependent patterns of regional industrial upgrading, it has paid less attention to the firm-level mechanisms underlying these patterns and to the role of spatially differentiated institutional environments. This paper examines how firm capabilities interact with locally varied policy regimes to shape export product upgrading in China. Using matched panel data linking firm-product exports with city-industry policy indicators, we show that firm upgrading is strongly capability-dependent, but systematically conditioned by local policy regimes. Stronger policy support weakens firms' reliance on pre-existing capabilities, facilitating upgrading into more technologically distant product spaces, while policy structure plays a critical role: competition-oriented policy regimes are more effective than selective ones in enabling path-breaking upgrading. These findings show that the ability of firms to move beyond capability-related trajectories depends critically on how local policies are structured, not merely on how much support is provided.