9月5日，复旦大学经济学院院长、中国社会主义市场经济研究中心主任张军教授在Project Syndicate官网上发表文章：China's Shift to City-Led Growth。
报业辛迪加（Project Syndicate）被称为“世界上最具智慧的专栏”，作者来自全球顶级经济学者、诺奖得主、政界领袖，主题包括全球政治、经济、科学与文化塑造者的观点，为全球读者提供来自全球最高端的原创文章、最具深度的评论，为解读“变动中的世界”提供帮助。
以下为文章全文
China has achieved some four decades of
rapid economic growth. But one powerful source of growth has yet to be fully
tapped: urbanization. Now, the potential of megacities as an engine of dynamism
and increased prosperity is finally getting the high-level attention it
deserves.
Over the last decade, China has been
working to shift from a manufacturing-led growth model fueled by low-cost labor
to an innovation-led, higher-value-added model underpinned by strong
productivity gains. Urbanization will be critical to facilitate this shift, not
least by enabling economies of scale.
Currently, though China is the world's most
populous country and its second-largest economy, only half the population lives
in urbanized areas, and less than 10% reside permanently in megacities. And the
country's urbanization rate remains well below the global average.
Growth in China's megacities – metropolitan
areas with a population exceeding ten million – has long been heavily
constrained by rigid state administrative divisions and planning agencies.
Indeed, in pursuing rapid industrialization, megacities have often been less
successful than smaller cities – which have largely evaded such constraints –
in accumulating productive capital, attracting foreign direct investment (FDI),
and demonstrating entrepreneurial spirit.
In the 1990s, the small city of Kunshan
became China's leading center for manufacturing electronic products. By
integrating themselves into global supply chains, small cities in Guangdong
province – including Dongguan, Huizhou, Shunde, and Zhongshan – have played a
critical role in establishing China as the “Factory of the World.”
But while the success of smaller cities is
to be celebrated, it is China's megacities where the greatest potential to fuel
future progress in productivity – and thus GDP growth – is to be found. So far,
China has just four “first-tier” cities (with populations exceeding 20
million): Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.
Given the size of China's population and
economy, that is not a lot. And, in fact, there is no reason to believe that
these megacities have reached their capacity, in terms of population or
contribution to economic growth. Moreover, China has many dynamic second-tier
cities – such as Chengdu, Tianjin, Hangzhou, Wuhan, and Suzhou – that are capable
of reaching first-tier status, if given the chance.
In order to maximize the potential of
China's cities, the government will need to be much more adaptive and flexible,
especially regarding its notoriously strict control of urban land-development
ratios. In particular, China must abandon its land-quota system, which not only
limits the amount of land cities can develop for future productivity growth,
but also allocates a disproportionate share of land to factories. Otherwise,
urbanization will continue pushing up already-high housing costs, but not
efficiently enough to power sustained growth and development.
The good news is that local governments are
already working with the central government to alleviate or even eliminate
existing administrative constraints. In China, cities' administratively defined
boundaries include both urban and rural jurisdictions, with the latter – called
the “county” – engaged mainly in agriculture. For example, about half of
Shanghai's administrative jurisdiction of 6,340 square kilometers (2,448 square
miles) is rural.
Local governments are now introducing
so-called county-district conversions, in order to expand urban districts into
rural jurisdictions. Such efforts, which the central government broadly
supports, will enable more housing construction and industrial and commercial
expansion.
Another strategy for advancing China's
transition toward a city-led growth model is to expand the role played by urban
clusters that leverage the strength of first-tier cities to boost growth in
less-developed areas. From an economic standpoint, the Yangtze and Pearl River
Deltas – which encompass megacities like Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Shenzhen –
are undoubtedly the most important such urban agglomerations, set to generate
the higher future productivity gains from economies of scale and
complementarity.
Here, too, China's leadership has already
caught on. This past March, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced a plan for the
development of a city cluster in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay
Area, which covers nine cities, including Guangzhou and Shenzhen, as well as
the special administration regions of Hong Kong and Macau.
From 2010 to 2016, the annual GDP of the
Greater Bay Area soared from CN¥5.42 trillion ($82 billion) to CN¥9.35 trillion
($1.42 trillion), making it the world's third-largest urban economy, after
Tokyo and New York. Yet the population of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater
Bay Area is growing fast, and its GDP per capita is less than half that of
Tokyo, suggesting that its potential is nowhere near depleted.
Moreover, China's leaders seem to be eyeing
a second greater bay area, centered on Hangzhou Bay, which, because it overlaps
with the Yangtze River Delta, could go a long way toward integrating that
already-prosperous region. Such a cluster could cover the coastal megacity of
Shanghai, as well as about ten more important cities across the Zhejiang and
Jiangsu provinces. It would include world-class ports, such as the Port of
Ningbo-Zhoushan (the world's busiest in terms of cargo tonnage). And it would
cover two of China's 11 existing free-trade zones. The result would be a bay
area on the scale of San Francisco and Tokyo.
The pace of China's economic growth over
the last four decades has been unprecedented. But China has yet to complete its
rise to rich-country status. As it upgrades its economy to become more
knowledge-based and technology-driven, it is again leveraging its strengths.
There is no better example of this than the ongoing effort to tap the potential
of megacities.
文章来源：Project Syndicate
