"It has been argued in the literature that China is underurbanized in large part because of restrictions on migration. While the presence of migration barriers can help explain why existing cities fail to achieve their optimal size, it cannot explain the lack of cities. Although migration has become much easier over time, the number of cities in China has been rather stagnant. In this paper, we argue that lack of appropriate mechanisms for creating new cities is another reason for underurbanization. Under China's hierarchical governance structure, the only way to create new cities is through the centralized policy of upgrading existing counties or prefectures into cities. However, in practice the implementation of the county-to-city upgrading policy was more complicated than expected. Based on a county-level panel dataset, this paper shows that jurisdictions that were upgraded to cities prior to 1998 do not perform better relative to their counterparts that remain to be counties in terms of both economic growth and providing public services. The policy was retracted in 1997, freezing the number of county-level cities since then. This, in turn, contributes to the observed underurbanization." from authors' abstract
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in its series IFPRI discussion papers with number
875.