Li Han was interviewed by a reporter from Chinanews.com.
Photo by Zhang Lang
Zhongxin Finance, December 30 (Zuo Yuqing) On the 30th, at the 2021 Annual Meeting of Zhongxin Finance and Online Cloud Summit, Li Han, executive vice president of the Institute of Economics and Management, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, pointed out that to avoid "big city diseases" "The important path is to develop urban agglomerations."
Urbanization is an important engine driving the economic growth of a country or region.
As my country’s urbanization process enters the second half, the rapidly growing city size poses huge challenges to the city’s infrastructure, public service levels, social governance capacity, and environmental carrying capacity, and some large cities are too high in the first place, which has also led to regional unbalanced development.
How to correctly play the role of agglomeration of cities and promote the coordinated development of regional economy?
Li Han believes that urban agglomerations are the main spatial carriers of urbanization in populous countries.
Urban agglomeration allows the clustered cities to not only gain the advantages of agglomeration, but also to avoid unfavorable factors such as urban congestion and environmental pollution caused by their own expansion, while also taking into account the coordinated development of the region.
"Nowadays, many agglomerated cities cannot be called a cluster of cities," Li Han said, and they are more suitable to be described as "a group of cities."
So, how to develop from a "cluster of cities" to an urban agglomeration?
Li Han believes that to build urban agglomerations, we must first realize the integration of commodity markets, and the key to market integration lies in breaking down administrative barriers.
"Reducing the impact of administrative barriers between regions can enable the market to play a greater role."
In addition to administrative barriers, there are space barriers that need to be broken.
"Space barriers are caused by distance." Li Han said that space barriers can be achieved by improving the construction of inter-city rail transit and other infrastructure.
"Infrastructure interconnection and sharing can shorten the distance between cities and realize spatial co-city."
"In addition, it is necessary to achieve industrial integration, strengthen the internal industrial links of urban clusters, optimize the division of labor to form an industrial chain; enhance the flow of factors, and enhance the level of integration of the factor market and the labor market." Li Han said.
(Finish)