My new paper argues that a similar dynamic is now playing out within China. Coastal rich cities feature high land prices, high labor prices and increasingly stringent environmental regulation. These factors encourage land intensive manufacturing to leave these cities and to move to Western China and to leave China. The powerful central government and local Western Mayors are offering incentives for such factories to move West. This migration brings about some income convergence across regions but also impacts the spatial distribution of pollution and quality of life. We survey the emerging literature on China's industrialization and present a lot of new empirical evidence in this paper.
The Evolving Geography of China's Industrial Production: Implications for Pollution Dynamics and Urban Quality of Life
Siqi Zheng, Cong Sun, Ye Qi, Matthew E. Kahn
China’s rapid economic growth has been fueled by industrialization and urbanization. Given its export focus, this industrialization was spatially concentrated in the coastal eastern cities. Over the last decade, a spatial transformation has taken place leading to a deindustrialization of the rich coastal cities and sharp industrial growth in the inland cities. This survey examines recent work that studies the economic geography of industrial production, per-capita income, pollution and quality of life in China’s cities. We focus on the interaction between firms, local governments and the central government that together determine the new economic geography of industry and pollution within China.
