Internet, transportation infrastructure and the spatial structure of urban employment in China

ABSTRACT

This study revealed the non-linear impact of the internet on the spatial structure of intracity employment and how transportation infrastructure moderates this non-linear impact. Using data from 22.47 million enterprises from the China Economic Census of 2004, 2008 and 2013, we found that (1) on average, the internet promotes urban employment agglomeration, but this agglomeration effect diminishes marginally as internet penetration increases; (2) the internet promotes the secondary sector to agglomerate first and then disperse, while it only has an agglomeration effect on the tertiary sector; and (3) improvements in the transportation infrastructure diminish the internet’s agglomeration effect.

KEYWORDS:

• internet
• spatial structure of urban employment
• transportation infrastructure
• non-linear impact

JEL:

• O18
• O33
• R12

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank the editors and anonymous referees for very constructive comments on this paper.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Sixu Wu and Panpan Wang contributed equally to this paper.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. According to the regression results of the DELTA index, when the road area per resident exceeds 23 m², the value of (−0.101 + 0.032 × ln(Road density)) changes from negative to positive, and the impact of the internet changes from an inverted to a positive ‘U’-curve. In the sample of 289 cities in this study, only 19 cities have a road area per resident exceeding this threshold. In the same way, the threshold of expressway density is 55 m/km², the threshold of the number of buses per 10,000 residents is 20, and the threshold of the number of taxis per 10,000 residents is 4.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 72303027]; the Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project of China [grant number 23NDJC023Z]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 42071210]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 2022ECNU-XWK-XK001]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 2242023S20013]; and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71874084].