Government institutions and the dynamics of urban growth in China

Abstract

Economic growth in China in recent decades has largely rested on the dynamism of its cities. High economic growth has coincided with measures aimed at improving the efficiency of local governments and with a mounting political drive to curb corruption. Yet the connection between government institutions and urban growth in China remains poorly understood. This paper is the first to look into the link between government efficiency and corruption, on the one hand, and urban growth in China, on the other hand and to assess what is the role of institutions relative to more traditional factors for economic growth in Chinese cities. Using panel data for 283 cities over the period between 2003 and 2014, the results show that the urban growth in China is a consequence of a combination of favorable human capital, innovation, density, local conditions, foreign direct investment, and city-level government institutions. Both government quality-especially for those cities with the best governments-and the fight against corruption at the city level have a direct effect on urban growth. Measures to tackle corruption at the provincial level matter in a more indirect way, by raising or lowering the returns of other growth-inducing factors. those of Tables 2,3. These can be made available upon request.RODRÍGUEZ-POSE AND ZHANG | 655 6 Endogeneity can be associated with a number of factors, including missing variables, reverse causality, and measurement errors. The use of system GMM is unlikely to fully address all these biases. In particular, the main source of endogeneity -reverse causality-cannot be really treated empirically without rigorous theoretical arguments. 7 The distance is the Euclidean distance between city i and city j. ORCID Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

Winners and losers of rapid growth in Turkey: Analysis of the spatial variability of convergence

“…Finally considering the impact of regional institutional environment, we end up insignificant impact for Turkish regions. Unlike the expectations of Rodríguez‐Pose (), Bourdin and Cornier () and Rodríguez‐Pose and Zhang (), lack of influence between institutional satisfaction and regional growth is a sign for lack of connection between perception on local governmental activities and regional welfare in Turkey. This can be partially explained by the centrality of public services in Turkey, which in turn directs individual perception on government quality towards central government.…”

“…We include population density which controls for urbanization and agglomeration based externalities. A final line that recently starts to receive more attention is the importance devoted to local governance and institutional quality (Rodríguez‐Pose & Zhang, ). We take into account the possible differences in regional institutional quality by controlling for overall regional satisfaction measure which embeds information on satisfaction of individuals to governmental services such as, education, health, infrastructure, legal services, social services, transportation services.…”

Quality of Sub-national Government and Regional Development in Africa

“…Charron et al, 2014). A series of studies have considered variations in quality of subnational government, finding it plays an important role in explaining sub-national differences in economic performance in Europe (Rothstein et al, 2013;Charron et al, 2014;Rodríguez-Pose and Garcilazo, 2015;Crescenzi et al, 2016) and China (Cai and Treisman, 2005;Cole et al, 2009;Rodríguez-Pose and Zhang, 2019).…”

Institutions and the fortunes of territories

“…Despite these notable barriers, considerable progress has been made of late in terms of measuring institutions and their impact at subnational level in different parts of the world (e.g., Beer & Lester, 2015, for Australia; Rodríguez‐Pose & Zhang, 2019, 2020 and Wang, 2019, for China), but particularly in Europe. The Quality of Government Institute of the University of Gothenburg has made the largest contribution in this respect.…”