Increasing returns to scale (IRS) play a core role in economic geography, urban economics and new economic geography, and are almost an article of faith of scientists engaged in these disciplines; however, the empirical evidence of increasing returns to scale is rarely of interest for these scientists. This paper examines the role of increasing returns to scale in empirical explanation of the pattern of economic growth. It presents estimates for the Dynamic Verdoorn Law related labor productivity growth to output growth, using data for the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region (BTHMR) during 1995-2000, 2000-2007 and 1995-2007. Over the traditional specification, we have three advantages. First, regional social forces, cultural forces and the thickness of institution associated with output growth are considered rather than only the capital stock as the omitted variables. Second, spatial dependence of output growth and labor productivity growth are modeled in our SDM. Third, spatial heterogeneity is modeled through the Bayesian Spatial Heterogeneity Model (BSHM), which alleviates the biasness caused by heteroscedasticity. Based on the specification of model and the proper estimation methods, several results are drawn as follows. 1) The output growth has a strong positive relationship with labor productivity growth about 0.9, which strongly confirms the IRS play an essential part in the polarization and pattern of economic growth in BTHMR. 2) The magnitude of the positive impact of output growth on labor productivity growth is increasing with time, which means that the polarization of economic growth in BTHMR will continue and becomes stronger. In our BSHM, the impact of output growth on labor productivity during 2000-2007 is 0.06 larger than that during 1995-2000. 3) The growth of output in contiguous regions has a negative influence on the very region, which vividly depicts the process of growth for metropolises such as Beijing and Tianjin with their economic growth based on the attraction of productive factors from contiguous regions. This paper argues that our model, built around the productivity-output growth nexus is consistent with an attempt what one might expect as an empirical manifestation of new economic geography theory, and therefore it is seen as a way of confronting our version of new economic geography with data, and an attempt to discover the mechanism of the economic growth in BTHMR.
GUO Teng-yun, DONG Guan-peng, SUN Wei
. Increasing returns to scale and economic growth of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region[J]. GEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH, 2011
, 30(10)
: 1873
-1881
.
DOI: 10.11821/yj2011100013
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