Abstract: Provincial capital cities are often playing the role of growth poles in the provincial economic development, but they are also faced with the related problems in their own development. By choosing the perspective of local protection, this paper tries to interpret the development of China’s provincial capital cities. It firstly applies the three-region model of the new economic geography to analyze how local protection is affecting the development of the capital cities. The numerical simulation results show that when the degree of local protection of one province is greater than that of other provinces, the centripetal force of this capital city’s development would be greater than the centrifugal force, resulting in too rapid and too large-scale development of the capital city, and the economic disparities between the regions of the province would be further widened. Conversely, when the cooperation between the province and other provinces is enhanced, the development of the capital city will be subject to certain inhibition, and the development of other regions in this province would be promoted. An empirical analysis combined with the data of recent years also shows that local protection has a significant impact on the primacy ratio of the capital city, which verifies the results of the theoretical analysis. When further eliminating the endogenous problems with the dynamic panel system GMM method, the results of the robustness test obtained are also consistent with the results of the theoretical analysis.

Key words: local protection; capital city; the new economic geography; centripetal force; primacy ratio