Role of Producer Services in Regional Economic Growth: A Study of Yangtze River Delta

More and more literatures have argued that producer services now show the highest growth rates of all sectors in Western economies, and have increasingly played a crucial role in competitiveness improvement, employment creation, and so on in regional economy as a whole. From a different perspective of industrial cluster, this paper focuses on the role of producer services in regional economic growth in the emerging market economies, discusses theoretically the effects of producer services on the manufacturing industry cluster, and put forward, based on the theoretical framework, that producer services generate mainly four effects on industrial cluster and play an active and strategic role in regional economic growth. Finally a case about the development of producer services in Yangtze River Delta is studied quantitatively; and co-integration and Granger test is used to testify whether producer logistics service, a part of producer services, affects the growth of regional economy