城市政府驻地搬迁对经济增长的影响研究

Relocating government seats is a city administrative strategy for optimizing space and structural organization, and for promoting economic development through re-allocation of urban space resources. However, there is a disconnect between the central government's current cautious attitude toward government relocation, and local government's actual benefits from such relocation, which reinforces the demand for policy evaluation research. Previous studies paid insufficient attention to the impact of urban government relocations on the overall economy, and lacked empirical evidence of large samples. This paper uses China's urban panel data from 1996 to 2016, and adopts a Difference-in-Difference approach based on Propensity Score Matching (PSM-DID) to examine the effect of urban government relocation on economic growth. The results show that urban government relocations significantly promote urban economic growth. However, other urban characteristics will also affect the economic growth effects of relocation, and produce heterogeneous results. Among these, urban characteristics such as migration distance, economic development level, fixed asset investment rate, and government intervention amplify the economic growth effect of relocation, while the growth of construction land reduces it. The size of the city, on the other hand, has no significant regulating effect on the economic growth generated by government relocation. From the perspective of the time, the long-term economic growth created by urban government relocation increases after about 7 years of relocation. The findings of this paper not only support the positive effect of urban government relocations on a city's economic growth, and provide an academic basis for optimizing administrative divisions adjustments, but also provide an important resource for the governments in considering the relocation plans for local administrative centers.