National Unified Market and Economic Growth:Evidence from Anhui's Integration into the Yangtze River Delta
The construction of a national unified market is an intrinsic requirement and basic support for promoting high-quality economic development.At present,most of the studies on the national unified market explore the concept,connotation,significance,and objectives of the national unified market from the macro level or the perspective of a single factor market,and there is a lack of sufficient theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between the construction of the national unified market and economic growth.The integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta(YRD)is not only related to the overall situation of coordinated regional economic development but also a key initiative to promote Chinese-style modernization and domestic economic circulation and plays a leading role in the construction of a unified national big market.However,in the existing literature exploring the relationship between regional integration policies and economic growth,few studies have explored the mechanisms borrowed from the scale effect and resource allocation effect,and most of them are based on data at the city or county level,a broader spatial research scale that cannot exclude the border spillover effects of policies.In this study,we consider Anhui's accession to the YRD as a"quasi-natural experiment"and construct a staggered difference-in-differences(DID)model based on the panel data of 1419 Anhui townships from 2000 to 2021 to systematically assess the impact of Anhui's accession to the YRD on the economic growth of Anhui townships and to validate the borrowed scale effect and the resource allocation effect,which are two important mechanisms for the economic growth of Anhui townships.It is found that Anhui's accession to the YRD produced a significant pro-growth effect,leading to an average increase of 1.66％in the level of economic development of Anhui townships compared with that before the policy shock.Mechanism tests reveal that Anhui's accession to the YRD has a pro-growth effect on the economic growth of Anhui townships through the borrowing scale effects,that is,increasing heterogeneous investment and cooperation and innovation,and resource allocation effects,that is,optimizing the allocation of production factors and industrial resources.Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the economic growth effect of Anhui's accession to the YRD is more significant in townships with small administrative size,low marketization,and municipal districts.Further analysis reveals that Anhui's entry into the YRD has a positive effect on the economic growth of Anhui townships within the Nanjing metropolitan area but not yet on those within the Hefei metropolitan area,making it possible to further analyze the"one-city-dominated"situation of the"strong capital"strategy versus the"multi-center city"situation of the"strong capital"strategy.This incites further analysis of the"strong provincial capital"strategy's"one city only"situation and the phenomenon of balanced development of multi-center cities.The contributions of this study are reflected in the following three aspects:first,in terms of research perspective,it explores the positive effect of the construction of a unified national market on economic growth by using Anhui's accession to the YRD as a quasi-natural experiment.Anhui's accession to the YRD is an important part of the regional integration strategy,and its experience and results can provide a reference for China's construction of a unified big market.Second,in terms of data use,this study uses the township satellite light data after cropping and fusion correction of China's township vector maps in the empirical analysis and examines the economic growth effect of Anhui joining the YRD from a more microscopic spatial scale after excluding geospatial spillover effects,which not only alleviates the problems of insufficient precision of urban or district county panel data but also directly reveals the actual effect of the construction of the national unified big market on the grassroots economic units.Third,in terms of mechanism analysis,this study examines the effect of Anhui joining the YRD on economic growth.In terms of mechanism analysis,this study analyzes the economic growth effect and mechanism of national unified market construction from the dimensions of the scale borrowing effect and resource allocation effect,providing important policy insights for the construction of a national unified market to promote economic growth.This study provides important policy insights for advancing the construction of a unified national market and promoting economic growth.First,regional integration should be strengthened to promote economic cooperation among regions.Second,optimize resource allocation and improve the efficiency of resource utilization.Third,implement a multilevel balanced development strategy and effectively utilize the"radiation effect"generated by core cities.
National Unified MarketBorrowed Size EffectResource Allocation EffectEconomic Growth
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
