Regional Chambers of Commerce and Urban Industrial Structure Convergence:From the Perspective of Comparative Advantages
Over the past four decades of reform and opening up,China's economy has maintained an impressive average annual growth rate of 9.2%,but there are prominent problems of unbalanced and unco-ordinated regional economic development.As reflected in industrial development,there are huge differences in the industrial structure between regions.Theoretically,disparities in knowledge acquisition capabilities may result in unbalanced industrial growth among regions,consequently leading to unbalanced economic develop-ment at the regional level.Regional connections serve as a potential solution to break the path lock of local in-dustrial development,then guiding the adjustment and upgrading of regional industrial structures.As a bridge connecting their place of origin and operation,how do regional chambers of commerce(RCoCs)affect the ad-justment of regional industrial structures?Clarifying this issue is of paramount importance for promoting a ra-tional division and collaboration of industries among regions and achieving coordinated regional economic de-velopment.This paper manually collects data on RCoCs at the city level,and utilizes the DID method to investigate how RCoCs affect the direction of regional industrial structure adjustment,measured by the industrial structur-al similarity between pairs of cities based on the China Industrial Enterprise Database from 2000 to 2013.The Yangtze River Delta region,characterized by high economic development,openness,and chamber of com-merce activity,serves as the primary research object.This paper finds that,on the whole,after the establish-ment of the RCoC,the industrial structure of its place of operation becomes similar to that of its place of ori-gin in the preceding year.Mechanism analysis reveals that RCoCs facilitate knowledge diffusion in industries with comparative advantages by guiding enterprises to invest across regions,thereby promoting the conver-gence of industrial structures between the two places.However,certain cities also take into account the differ-ences in resource endowments between the two places and compete in differentiated industries,leading to the divergence of industrial structures between cities.Furthermore,the convergence of industrial structures,driv-en by cross-city chambers of commerce,is desirable and conducive to the realization of coordinated economic development among cities.Expanding the scope of the study to the entire country,this paper finds that the es-tablishment of out-of-town chambers of commerce between cities in the eastern region or the Yangtze River Basin contributes to the convergence of industrial structures between the two places.The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows:First,it provides a novel explanation for the con-vergence of industrial structures between regions from the perspective of the formal social network of RCoCs.Second,it delves deeper into the impact and mechanism of municipal-level(rather than provincial-level)non-local chambers of commerce on the direction of urban industrial structure adjustment,thereby expanding the scope of research on the economic impact of RCoCs.Third,the conclusions have strong practical significance,and provide a theoretical foundation for leveraging non-local chambers of commerce as a means to promote the replication and diffusion of successful industrial development experiences between regions.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
