Does urban polycentricity contribute to regional economic growth? Empirical evidence from a panel of Chinese urban regions

ABSTRACTResearch examining the economic effects of urban polycentricity remains inconclusive. We contribute to this debate by developing a longitudinal framework in which changes in polycentricity in Chinese urban regions are linked with changes in total factor productivity. While we find no evidence of urban polycentricity being conducive to economic growth, we observe that the relationship depends on population size and the interactions between cities. We also find that cities borrow size from nearby cities in large urban regions, contributing to regional economic growth. We use our findings to reflect on China’s regional economic and urban development strategies.KEYWORDS: polycentricityurban regions; productivityborrowed sizeChinaJEL: C36D24O11R11 DISCLOSURE STATEMENTNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. Among them, BBW UR in Guangxi province is not included, as not all boundaries are coastal, and this UR shares a border with Vietnam.2. The autonomous prefectures cities with incomplete data include Xiangyang (2005–09), Hong Kong (2005–17) and Bijie (2005–17) alongside nine other cities.3. The conditions we set to determine ‘population centres’ are tailored to the Chinese context. We set the criterion (over 3 km²) given that some newly planned towns in some Chinese cities are surrounded by areas with low population density and weak infrastructure. While they may be regarded as population centres in absolute terms, they are not qualified as ‘actual’ population centres due to their modest influence on their surroundings and should therefore be filtered out (Li & Liu, Citation2018). Second, according to ‘The Rule on the Organization of Urban District Offices in China’ (2018), districts with populations of more than 100,000 should establish street offices. These street offices are responsible for the task prescribed by the municipal or district government (e.g., construction of economic development zone) (Ma & Wu, Citation2004). So, each street often has a concentrated area and the population density of the boundary region between streets is often relatively lower. Therefore, if the urban population in the district reaches 100,000, it might indicate the emergence of new population centres.4. The extraction of contiguous pixels is based on the eight-connectivity rule.5. The cohesion index denotes the average indexes between all pairs of interior points in an urban area; the proximity index denotes the average distance from all interior points to the centroid of the urban area; the spin index is the average of the square of the distances between all interior points and the centroid of the urban area; and the range index is the maximum distance between two points on the perimeter of the urban area.6. The estimation of the urban area in response to growth of urban population may be confounded by underlying city-specific trends, potentially driven by the initial conditions (i.e., the base situation in 1992). Nevertheless, controlling the projected historical population growth in the period 1992–2005 through the urban area instrumented partially addresses this concern, as it allows changes in city shapes to only affect the deviations from the city’s long-run path.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds UGent [grant number 01SC0820]; and the China Sponsorship Council [grant number 202006040029].