Urban scale, production efficiency, and dynamic development paths

Abstract

The rise and fall of a city is the inevitable result of its response to sustainable development over time. Using the scaling analysis framework of urban total factor productivity (TFP), we find that it can reveal how the rise and fall of a city occurs and changes on a time scale. We estimate the scaling of TFP for 299 prefecture-level cities in China based on urban wage and labor force data from 1999 to 2019. We show that a doubling of urban population increases productivity by about 18 %. The estimation of the scaling helps us identify which cities are more advantaged. Surprisingly, resource-based cities are typical examples of high-productivity cities, with an average efficiency advantage of 6.8 % higher. However, there are significant differences within resource-based cities, which seem to show advantages only in growth and maturity cities. We also describe the trajectory of urban development based on the local dynamics of urban wages and labor and discuss the general trend and potential mechanisms behind this process. In conclusion, our analysis of urban economic efficiency is conducive to understanding the rise-and-fall of urban development, and provides new methods, ideas and research perspectives for describing this dynamic. Most importantly, we find the difference between developing and developed countries is whether local dynamics can be maintained for a long time. It is of great significance to enrich the research of urban scaling theory in developing countries.