Real Estate Investment and Regional Economic Development in China-By Applying the Spatial Econometric Approach

Abstract

After China's market-oriented reform for real estate from 1998, real estate investment has achieved rapid development. The real estate sector has also been becoming a critical approach that the government releases macro policy in China. But with the fast development of the real estate, there is a concern about that the overheated investment in real estate will harm economic growth. A considerable debate on whether the increasing real estate investment is boosting the economy or, in contrast, is hurting the economy is still going on. We are using the ESDA (Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis) to see the spatial dependence on real estate investment and economic development, to find whether they have some similar pattern. The result shows that in the initial year in 2000, the economy led a high in east and low in west pattern. However, real estate investment still had a relatively homogeneous spatial distribution. While in 2018, two of them show a vital characteristic that high in the east and slowly shrinking toward the west, indicating that the developed economy attracted the investment into those areas, which follows the rule of development of the economy. Next, compare the fitness of OLS, GWR, and MGWR to determine the impact of real estate investment on the regional economy. All those three models indicated that the effects from real estate investment to economic development are getting weak, evidence from the data in 2016, 2018 and 2019. In more detail, the result ofMGWR is telling that the contribution of real estate investment to the regional economy is substantial in the east but slowly shrinking toward the west, and in overall, real estate investment has a positive correlation with regional economy.

Keywords: real estate investment, regional economy, ESDA, GWR, MGWR