By employing the city-level data from China during the spring of 2020, this study investigates the relationship between city-level resilience against the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemics and its affecting factors, including the inflow risk pressure of COVID-19 virus (population inflow from the epicenter), city agglomeration characteristics (urban population density and city size), healthcare resource adequacy, among others. The results reveal that, while managing COVID-19 inflow risk pressure plays a critical role in the city’s pandemic disaster resilience. city agglomeration characteristics also matters. To be exact, we find that large and high-density cities with high inter and intra-city mobility flows have more difficulties in containing the epidemic spread, but improving healthcare infrastructure adequacy and urban governance capacity can increase time efficacy of pandemic control and then improve the city’s resilience against pandemic. Although our analysis is based on the performance of Chinese cities in the case of COVID-19, the research framework can be applied in understanding COVID-19 control performance of cities in other countries and the findings can be useful for improving health-related urban resilience and sustainability.
In recent years, it has become common practice for Chinese local governments to inject land assets into financing platform companies and use them as mortgage or credit guarantees to obtain bank loans and issue urban investment bonds, which is known as “land financialization”. This study investigates the impact and mechanism of land financialization on the uncoordinated development of population urbanization and land urbanization in China. Theoretical analysis and empirical analysis results based on the data of prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2015 demonstrate that land financialization by local governments is a significant cause of the uncoordinated development of population urbanization and land urbanization, and the pressure of urban economic development will strengthen this negative impact. Extended analysis further reveals that in areas where population urbanization and land urbanization are uncoordinated, land financialization, while promoting urban spatial expansion, will lower land use efficiency and have an inverted U-shaped influence on economic growth due to a weak agglomeration effect. The above conclusion shows that urbanization driven by debt-based investment is unsustainable. Efforts should be made to establish a financialization system that propels sound urbanization and to build a stable input linkage between land financialization and the supply of urban public service.
This study analyzes the mechanism of coexistence of non-agricultural part-time work of farmer households and large-scale cultivation of cultivated land, and the effect of non-agricultural part-time work of the large farmer households on the agricultural labor productivity. Results indicate that non-agricultural part-time work of large farmer households promotes the agricultural labor productivity, particularly for those with higher non-agricultural incomes, younger age, higher education level and shorter distance between working places in urban sectors and rural residence. At the mean value of the samples, non-agricultural part-time work of the large farmer households will improve agricultural labor productivity by 27.1%. These results remain consistent after we experiment several robustness checks and the instrumental variable method. Further, it is worth stressing that non-agricultural part-time work inhibits the agricultural production for farmer households with labors less than three, while it exhibits positive effects for those with labors more than three. Finally, analysis of mechanism suggests that non-agricultural part-time work of large farmer households enhances the productivity via entering the agricultural association, increasing farm mechanization degree, and promoting the centralized production and farm management on the transferred farmland. It’s suggestive to maintain total area of the transferred farmland to avoid the reverse effects and then the optimal total cultivated area within the range of (100, 200) Mu. Policy implications of our work are discussed.
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