The Agglomeration of Producer Services and Economic Growth——Based on Panel Data VAR Analysis of Prefecture-level Cities in China

From the comprehensive view of Marshall externalities,Jacobs externalities and new economic geography,a dynamic econometric analysis is made on the effect of the agglomeration of producer services on economic growth across 286 prefectural or higher level cities for the period of 2000-2009 in China based on panel data VAR model.The results show that there exist long-term equilibrium relationships between the scale of producer services,specialization agglomeration and variety agglomeration of producer services and the local economic growth.And there exists one-way causality relationship between the agglomeration of producer services and economic growth.The variety agglomeration other than specialization agglomeration promotes economic growth.Because the total size of producer services is small,the scale effects of producer services on economic growth are not significant.Encouraging the variety of producer services in cities and avoiding the over-agglomeration in the same sector,enlarging the operating scale of some important service sectors may be the expected policies.