The Economic Growth Efficiency of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomeration

Abstract

At present, China has formed three world-class city agglomerations, they are the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei agglomeration. The integrated development of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration has received more and more social attentions. Compared with other urban agglomerations, a characteristic of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration shows that the difference of economic development is extremely large. Total factor productivity refers to the part of output increase which can’t be explained by input factors. From domestic and foreign literatures, total factor productivity can be used to measure the quality of economic growth. Based on malmquist index, the change of total factor productivity growth can be decomposed into the change of technological progress, scale effect change and pure technical efficiency change. Therefore, in order to understand the regional difference of economic growth quality, the article makes an empirical study based on the data of 10 cities in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration, the time span is from 2000 to 2017. The result shows that there exists a serious regional imbalance of the total factor productivity in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration. In addition, the empirical results also suggest that the difference of total factor productivity mainly comes from the difference of technological progress. At last, according to the empirical results, in order to promote the regional economic integration, this paper puts forward a series of suggestions, such as developing comparative industries, promoting traffic integration, breaking the barriers of elements and so on.