Local Protectionism and Industrial Concentration in China: Overall Trend and Important Factors

Abstract

The paper studies the overall time trend of geographic concentration of China’s industries and the factors important to its changes. We attempt to address the following questions: Why are some industries concentrated in a few locations while others scattered across many provinces? How has the overall degree of industrial concentration changed during the economic reform? While investigating factors influencing industrial localization, we pay special attention to the role of local protectionism. On the overall time trend of China’s industrial concentration, our finding is in sharp contrast with that of Always Young in his widely-know paper. Using dynamic penal analysis, we find that industries with higher tax-plus-profit ratio in the past and those with higher share of state owned enterprises tend to have higher degree of local protectionism, and therefore lower level of industrial concentration. In addition to local protectionism, we also examine the impact of scale economies and external economies on industrial concentration.

本文研究我國產業的地區集中度的決定因素及變動趨勢 ,也就是探討為什么某些產業集中在部分地區、而其他產業則比較平均地分布在各個地區 ,同時考察我國制造業的地區集中度是呈上升或下降趨勢。在考慮產業的地區集中度的決定因素時 ,重點考察了地方保護主義的作用。我們關于產業地區集中度變動趨勢的研究發現推翻了AlwynYoung的著名文章的結論。運用對數據集的動態估計方法 ,我們發現在利稅率較高以及國有化程度較高的產業 ,地方保護更趨嚴重 ,產業的地區集中度也相應較低。除了地方保護之外 ,我們也考慮了規模經濟以及產業群聚效應對集中度的影響。