Economic Transition and Changing Location of Manufacturing Industry in China: A Study of the Yangtze River Delta

Abstract

Industrial restructuring is widely considered an important force in regional economic growth and sustainable development. With increased globalization and economic transition, a dramatic industrial restructuring has been taking place in China. Applying geographically weighted shift-share model (GW-SSM) and geographically and temporally weighted regression model (GTWR), we analyze (re)location dynamics and determinants of the manufacturing industry in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) from 1999 to 2013, with particular attention to the implications of economic transition and institutional restructuring. We find that high-tech and capital-intensive manufacturing industries agglomerated in coastal cities, while labor-intensive and resource-based sectors have become spatially more dispersed to peripheral areas. We also find that the development of service and high-tech industries, rising labor costs, and more strict environmental regulations have facilitated the geographic dispersion of labor- and pollution-intensive industries. Moreover, regions with advantages in intermediate goods, preferential policies, and urbanization economies are attractive to capital- and technology-intensive manufacturing industries. Our research suggests that development policies should be tailored to specific regions to promote local production and innovative networks and make manufacturing industries more competitive.

The Evolution of Industrial Agglomerations and Specialization in the Yangtze River Delta from 1990–2018: An Analysis Based on Firm-Level Big Data

“…We found that since 1990, most industries in the YRD have formed distinct spatial patterns of specialization and spatial division of labor. For example, the manufacturing has transferred from the north-central region to the north, and most regional core cities have experienced deindustrialization processes, this finding stands in line with recent studies on manufacturing relocation in YRD [61]. High-end industries are clustering to the three biggest core cities of Shanghai (A1), Nanjing (B1), and Hangzhou (C1), while the northern cities of YRD are more specialized in scientific research and polytechnic services.…”

Global and Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression Models for Modeling PM2.5 in Heilongjiang, China from 2015 to 2018

“…GTWR deals with both spatial and temporal nonstationarities simultaneously by constructing a weight matrix based on spatiotemporal distance. GTWR greatly expands the boundary of local modeling techniques, and has been applied in various fields, such as environment, economics, sociology, and so on [24,[26][27][28][29][30]. As a special case of GTWR, GWR ignores the temporal non-stationarity, while TWR (temporally weighted regression) ignores the spatial non-stationarity thus that GTWR integrates GWR and TWR into one uniform framework.…”

Interaction between Higher Education Outputs and Industrial Structure Evolution: Evidence from Hubei Province, China

“…Confronted with the severe environmental pollution caused by industrial production, many countries have been keen on developing strategic, innovative, and profitable industries to proceed with higher quality development and strive to achieve a balance between economic development and environmental protection [64,65]. Thus, industrial structure evolution is widely considered as an important force in sustainable development [12]. Meanwhile, the advent of the global economy, the expansion of technological knowledge, and the growth of the knowledge production have made higher education inclusive and directly responsible for industrial structure evolution.…”

“…Nevertheless, despite large amounts of investment, Nolan [11] found that these policies had not resulted in the creation of corresponding competitive technologies to help China improve its industrial structure. On the contrary, the industrialization model of China has remained resource-intensive and brought about increasingly severe environmental pollution and ecological deterioration, which have endangered regional sustainable development [12]. Further, China's lag in industrial evolution is becoming restrictive and confines Chinese enterprises to lower-end industries, thus hindering China's sustained development in a globalised world [13].…”