Abstract Since the reform and opening up, along with the rapid increase of urbanization rate, housing burden and public service show increasingly prominent impact on population agglomeration. This paper uses the panel threshold model to discuss the relation of housing burden and public service to population agglomeration in 48 cities in China’s three major urban agglomerations from 2007 to 2016. The results show that housing burden and public services have significant threshold effect on population agglomeration with significant regional differences. On the one hand, housing burden is positively correlated with population agglomeration. However, in first-tier and second-tier cities, it is diminishing in marginal effect, while in third-tier and fourth-tier cities, it shows an inverted u-shape feature of increasing first and then decreasing. On the other hand, public services are also positively correlated with population agglomeration, with diminishing marginal effect in first-tier and second-tier cities and increasing marginal effect in third-tier and fourth-tier cities. Therefore, to promote population agglomeration, differentiated population attraction policies should be adopted in different cities. First-tier and second-tier cities should focus on reducing the housing burden while improving the efficiency of public services, and third-tier and fourth-tier cities should continuously increase the supply of public services.
LI Wei-jun. Housing Burden, Public Services and Population Agglomeration —Empirical Analysis Based on 48 Cities of Three Major Urban Agglomerations in China. Economic Survey, 2019, 36(5): 09.
2019, Vol. 36 
