Can the urban spatial structure accelerate urban employment growth? Evidence from China

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of urban spatial structure on urban employment growth in China by focusing on two dimensions, monocentricity, and compactness.Theoretically, the urban spatial structure affects urban employment through its effects on transportation costs, the concentration of economic activities, and urban amenities. Our empirical analysis verifies a nonlinear U-shaped relationship between the monocentricity of a city and the growth rate of urban employment.Additionally, we find that a high level of compactness accelerates urban employment growth. Furthermore, cities that are more monocentric and more compact experienced more rapid urbanization during our sample period. We then use an instrumental variable approach to identify causal effects, and we obtain similar results.Our findings indicate that to accelerate the transfer of labor to urban sectors, governments in developing countries should pay attention to the planning of the urban spatial structure.

Income Inequality in Africa: Exploring the Interaction Between Urbanization and Governance Quality

“…In the same vein, our finding is in line with the result of Ali et al, (2021) who posited that unplanned urbanization with low rate of urban infrastructure could hinder economic growth and increase income inequality. Similarly, the result is in line with Xiao et al, (2021)'s work which documented that uncontrolled urbanization could lead to the environmental pollution which could negatively affect agriculture productivity. Consequently, it contributes to increasing income inequality through environmental degradation.…”

“…The finding is not surprising given the unplanned and unequal urban growth in Africa. The finding is consistent with (Ali et al, 2021;Sulemana et al, 2019;Xiao et al, 2021). For instance, this finding is consistent with the arguments of Sulemana et al, (2019) who used the Gini index as proxy of income inequality to examine the relationship between urbanization and income inequality for a panel of 48 sub-Saharan African economies over the period 1996-2016.…”

“…According to the authors, urban growth in Africa has been related to uncontrolled rural-urban migration which has led to an increase of income inequality and poverty. This finding has also been corroborated by Xiao et al, (2021), who argued that unplanned urbanization could lead to crime and political instability, which by extension could retard economic growth and increase income inequality. Further, the authors also argued that uncontrolled urbanization could lead to the increase of living cost, which in turn, could remain unaffordable for the poor people and thus increase income inequality.…”

Identification and characterization of urban polycentric structure based on points of interest in Shenyang, China

“…With continuous enrichment and improvement in geospatial big data, the research on polycentric urban structure based on Internet big data and traditional survey data remains worthy of further discussion. Additionally, determining the polycentric structure of a city is necessary, but the effect of this structure on a city's development and growth deserves further attention, especially the comparative study of the characteristics of the evolution of the polycentric structure and the formation mechanism of different cities in the context of the same regional development (Xiao et al., 2022).…”

Effects of Polycentricity on Economic Performance and Its Dependence on City Size: The Case of China

“…In this paper, we focus mainly on the morphological spatial structure rather than the functional structure, which involves the networks between centers [13,14]. Moreover, we measure spatial structure with data on the distribution of employment rather than with other human activity data such as population [11], land use [15], or nighttime light [16,17]. The main reason for this choice is that our research aims at addressing the spatial frictions associated with the labor market.…”