Key Industrial Policies and Industrial Unintentional Convergence:From the Perspective of Land Market Sector Preference
As a policy tool guiding industrial development,national key industrial policies have significant implications for local resource allocation.However,in pursuit of economic growth targets,local governments blindly respond to national industrial policies,allocating land resources to industries supported by national key industry policies.Such local government behavior leads to distortions in the land market.This subjective development model,characterized by"central government leading,local governments following,"objectively leads to regional industrial homogenization,manifesting as profound land market sector preference.The resultant market segmentation significantly impedes regional division of labor,economic syn-ergy,and the construction of a unified national market.This paper focuses on how local governments respond to central governments'national key industry policies in the land market,the impact on the convergence of provincial industrial structures,and the potential mechanisms.Answering these questions helps understand the policy incentives behind industrial"unintentional convergence",providing policy in-sights for regulating local governments'land leasing behavior,optimizing provincial industrial structure layouts,and pro-moting regional economic synergy.It is of great theoretical and practical significance for clarifying the relationship be-tween government and market in the land market,advancing land factor market reform,and improving the socialist mar-ket economy.Using land transaction data from 2007 to 2019,this paper examines the impact of national key industry policies on in-dustrial convergence from the perspective of land market sector preference.Our findings show that the national key industry policies significantly promote land sector preference,leading to provincial industrial convergence.Economically,during pe-riods of industry support by national key industry policies,the geographic dispersion of the land resource allocation index in-creases on average by 5.1％.Mechanism tests indicate that the disparities in economic growth within a province,prefecture-level cities'pressure to achieve growth targets,and local governments'fiscal pressure serve as channels that ex-plain how key industrial policy leads to industrial convergence.Heterogeneity analysis indicates that policy effects are more pronounced in provinces with lower marketization and higher local protectionism.Additionally,this paper explores how the coordination of national and local key industry policies affects the local geographical distribution of industry allocation and examines the underlying drivers of industrial convergence.This paper finds that to obtain external support from the central government,local governments tend to uniformly allocate land resources to industries encouraged by national key industry policies,even if these industries are not locally encouraged,resulting in inefficient expansion of industries without compara-tive advantages.Furthermore,this paper finds that this type of industrial convergence does not result in significant agglom-eration effects.Instead,it hampers regional economic synergies.Therefore,the results reveal that industrial convergence is characterized as"unintentional convergence".This paper contributes to current literature in three ways.Firstly,this paper adds to current literature on the economic effects of land finance.This paper expands the research perspective on land market distortions,evaluating the impact of na-tional key industry policies on industrial convergence based on land market sector preference.Secondly,previous literature has shown that industrial policies lead to local governments'selective land leasing behavior,resulting in industrial conver-gence.However,related literature has not further confirmed whether this land market sector preference-induced conver-gence constitutes"intentional convergence"."Intentional convergence"does not cause negative effects but may promote in-dustrial agglomeration effects.However,"unintentional convergence"is mainly the result of industrial policy intervention.Therefore,this paper furthers existing literature by revealing that the industrial convergence induced by national key indus-try policies is caused by policy intervention.Thirdly,the paper deepens the understanding of spatial imbalance in regional in-dustrial structure layout.From the perspective of industrial policy formulation,this paper sheds new light on mitigating the"unintentional convergence"of local industrial structures,offering policy suggestions for regulating local governments'land leasing behavior,optimizing local industrial structure layouts,and promoting regional economic and industrial synergy.
Key Industry PoliciesIndustrial ConvergenceLand MarketSector Preference
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
