Abstract | Based on the new economic geography theory, this paper considers precondition of agglomeration economy and analyzes how urban governments can promote the coordinated development of cities through infrastructures. We establish an asymmetric new economic geography model which contains interregional trade cost and urban congestion cost together, and demonstrating how can interregional infrastructures and municipal infrastructures reduce these two cost above. From a microscopic perspective, this paper analyzing the heterogeneity effect and mechanism of interregional infrastructures and municipal infrastructures to coordinated development of cities. Furthermore, we discuss about the interaction effects of two kinds of infrastructures. Our research reveals why large cities fail to solve the congestions and urban diseases,while small and medium-sized cities cannot effectively attract industries and population inflow by the local municipal infrastructures investment policy. Based on numerical simulation, the policy effect of improving local municipal infrastructures is nonlinear. When the level of interregional infrastructures is higher, the policy effect of increasing local municipal infrastructures is more significant. But if interregional infrastructures are at a low level, the policy effect of improving the local municipal infrastructures is not obvious or maybe even counterproductive.
There are two factors of the improvement of regional infrastructures to urban coordinated development. Firstly, there is an "inverted U" relationship between the regional infrastructures level and the urban scale. When the regional infrastructures level exceeds a certain threshold, the improvement of interregional infrastructures will promote the diffusion of industries and population from central large cities to periphery. It can not only solve the problem of "city diseases" in large cities, but also will help some small and medium-sized cities with solving the problems such as insufficient population, weak industrial base and low agglomeration effect. Secondly, the interregional infrastructures have interaction with municipal infrastructures. When the level of interregional infrastructures is high, the improvement of municipal infrastructures in small and medium-sized cities is more significant to attract industries. When the level of interregional infrastructures is average, the improvement of local municipal infrastructures in large cities may lead to excessive inflows of population and industries which make large cities further congestion. When the interregional infrastructures are at a high level, the improvement of local municipal infrastructures in large cities can reduce the congestion cost.
In the presence of the core-periphery space structure, large cities cannot solve the "city diseases" such as traffic congestion and excessive-priced housing by the single policy of internal municipal infrastructures investment. But it is necessary to implement the functional dissolving by put forward regional integration with small and medium-sized cities surrounded. New towns (or new districts) which have weak industrial base should also improve municipal infrastructures while pay more attention to interregional infrastructures docking with neighboring large cities. Through these infrastructure connections, new towns (or new districts) can take advantage of markets and intermediate inputs in large cities to attract industries and population flow effectively, while can avoid these towns or districts becoming "ghost towns" or "empty cities" which have only urban hardware facilities and without industries and population. The above conclusion shows that urban governments must have open minds and think of strategic locations and development paths of the cities from the global height. They can also seek infrastructure connectivity and sharing development of economic and social within broader scope of space scale, even in order to solve the problems of themselves. By improving the local competitive advantage, urban governments can improve interregional infrastructures and break administrative barriers in regional markets, establishing cross-regional coordination mechanism to achieve the differentiated development goals of different types of cities. The conclusions of this paper have great theoretical significance and practical significance that we can put forward urban coordinated development through infrastructure construction input and optimal combination in the integration of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and construction of Xiongan New Area.
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