Spatial Dimensions of Chinese Economic Development

Does Urban Proximity Enhance Technical Efficiency? Evidence From Chinese Agriculture

“…Conversely, in the more developed and urbanized parts of China, almost every county‐level city is close to a higher level city. Yet, as rural workers generally prefer to migrate to large cities rather than to county‐level cities (Chan et al., ), proximity to a county‐level city does not entail a reduction of rural labor surplus in more urbanized provinces. Second, as underlined in Section , given their similar economic structure, growth in county‐level cities can produce backwash effects on counties.…”

“…Such a phenomenon may be particularly at work in Eastern and Northern China. Indeed, small cities have benefited from high growth rates in coastal provinces, where export processing jobs have developed, and close to large cities, which stimulate the economic development of smaller cities (Chan et al., ).…”

Malaria suitability, urbanization and persistence: Evidence from China over more than 2000 years

“…Finally, our paper contributes to the literature associated with the identification of factors that drive China's urban growth (e.g., Chan et al (2008), Jia (2014) or Faber (2014)). Our main contribution to this branch of literature is to point out the crucial importance of fundamental factors that influenced the initial distribution of urbanization for the understanding of today's spatial structure of urbanization.…”

Internal Geography, International Trade, and Regional Specialization

“…Its rising external trade has been largely driven by its comparative advantages based on factor endowments. Before market-oriented reforms, it has been described as a closed agricultural economy with an economic structure lacking in industrial specialization and agglomeration (Chan et al 2008) To this data, we add the distance of each prefecture to China's coastline. More precisely, we calculate the Euclidian distance from the administrative center of a prefecture to that of the nearest coastal prefecture.…”