关键词: 城市群, 经济集聚, 公共服务供给, 空间溢出效应

Abstract: At present, China's basic public service supply is facing a situation of low total level, regional imbalance and imperfect institutional mechanism, resulting in the growth of residents' demand for public services lagging behind the economic development. Therefore, how to comprehensively enhance the local public service supply capacity and improve the adaptability of the public service supply system to continuously meet the needs of the people for a better life is particularly urgent.
Using the panel data of 275 prefecture-level cities in China from 2004 to 2019 to construct progressive DID and spatial multiplier models, this paper finds that the economic agglomeration effect generated by the construction of urban agglomerations significantly promotes the improvement of the public service supply. Mechanism analysis shows that compared with non-urban agglomeration cities, urban agglomeration cities have attracted a larger amount of capital and a greater number of enterprises, and have created “agglomeration rent”, and local governments have increased the tax revenue by taxing “agglomeration rent”, thereby providing a strong financial guarantee for improving the supply of public services. Heterogeneity discussions show that the policy effects of urban agglomeration construction are more significant in less financially stressed cities and in the central and western regions. The study also finds that the resource agglomeration function and efficiency advantages of urban agglomerations at this stage have a “siphon effect” rather than a “radiation effect” on the necessary resource elements in the process of the public service supply.
In conclusion, this study has the following contributions: (1)It reflects on the strategic taxation behavior of local governments and the logic of the public service supply from the perspective of the agglomeration effect of urban agglomeration, which is conducive to providing a new perspective for evaluating how economic agglomeration affects the development of public services. (2)It uses the entropy weight method to construct the local public service supply index and conducts an empirical research by applying the construction of urban agglomeration as an exogenous quasi-natural experiment to measure economic agglomeration. This helps to provide methodological support for the construction of the local public service supply and the economic agglomeration index system. (3)This paper finds that relying on the economic agglomeration effect generated by the construction of urban agglomerations, while enhancing the supply of local public services, weakens the level of the public service supply in spatially adjacent cities. These important findings have policy reference value for strengthening cross-regional organization and coordination, coordinating public service standards, and exploring and sharing experience in the public service supply.

Key words: Urban Agglomeration, Economic Agglomeration, Public Service Supply, Spatial Spillover Effect