Digital Infrastructure,Spatiotemporal Costs and Spatial Distribution of Manufacturing Industry
The digital economy has emerged as a strategic choice to harness new opportunities presented by the lat-est technological revolution and industrial transformation.Digital infrastructure serves as the hardware foundation for de-veloping the digital economy and functions as the"highway"for digital production elements.The development of digital infrastructure significantly influences conventional production models by facilitating the rapid and efficient flow of digital production elements across spatial dimensions,reducing the spatiotemporal costs of economic activities such as inter-firm interactions and consumer information searches,and potentially reshaping the manufacturing spatial distribution to achieve a new regional equilibrium.However,there is a lack of rigorous analysis in existing literature on how digital infra-structure affects the spatial distribution of the manufacturing industry.This paper aims to address this gap.This paper considers digital infrastructure in the new economic geography model,and theoretically elaborates on the internal mechanism of digital infrastructure reshaping manufacturing spatial layout,which is empirically tested using data on China's digital infrastructure construction and manufacturing development.The findings are as follows:Firstly,the improvement of digital infrastructure reduces the information"iceberg"transportation cost of cross-regional transportation of manufactured goods,forming a mechanism of agglomeration amplification of the"local market effect"of digital infra-structure,and enhancing the role of market size in promoting manufacturing agglomeration.Secondly,the mechanism of de-centralization amplification of the"market crowding effect"formed by digital infrastructure construction through reducing in-formation"iceberg"transportation costs is not significant.Thirdly,digital infrastructure promotes spatial spillover of knowledge,reducing the willingness and necessity of manufacturing enterprises and employees to choose agglomeration to acquire knowledge,forming a decentralization amplification mechanism of manufacturing on the path of knowledge spa-tial spillover,and promoting the decentralized distribution of China's manufacturing industry.Fourthly,China's digital in-frastructure is constantly improving,greatly reducing the"iceberg"transportation cost of interregional product transporta-tion information.However,due to regional barriers to the flow of data elements,its role in promoting knowledge spatial spillover has not been fully utilized.Therefore,the role of digital infrastructure construction in promoting manufacturing agglomeration through reducing information"iceberg"transportation costs may be greater than its role in promoting manufacturing decentralization through strengthening knowledge spatial spillover.Digital infrastructure has generally pro-moted the spatial agglomeration of manufacturing.The marginal contributions are reflected in two aspects.Firstly,it improves the analytical framework for understand-ing the impact of digital infrastructure on the spatial distribution of the manufacturing industry.It integrates the effects of digital infrastructure on information"iceberg"transportation costs and spatial knowledge spillover into a unified theoretical framework,constructing a new economic geography model that incorporates locational factors of digital infrastructure.This framework allows for an in-depth exploration of how digital infrastructure influences the spatiotemporal costs of product pro-duction,transportation,and knowledge spillover,forming the"agglomeration force"and"dispersion force"that affect the spatial distribution of the manufacturing industry.Secondly,it provides comprehensive empirical tests of the theoretical con-clusions and mechanisms.Based on measurements of local market size,market congestion,and knowledge spillover vari-ables,this paper designs a spatial econometric model to test the intrinsic mechanisms through which digital infrastructure impacts the spatial distribution of the manufacturing industry,quantifying the relative strength of these mechanisms and of-fering empirical support for the theoretical analysis.
Digital InfrastructureSpatiotemporal CostsSpatial Distribution of Manufacturing IndustryLS Model
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
