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The Sunday Paper – Building Tall, Falling Short: An Empirical Assessment of Chinese Skyscrapers

China has built 1,575 buildings with a height in excess of 100-meters (hereafter ‘skyscrapers’) since the year 2000. This makes the country (by far) the leader in terms of construction, and therefore a great place to analyze the benefits of these types of development.

Jin Wang (et al.) of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has produced a-first-of-it’s-kind study using a variety of databases which he/they hope will, a) inform planners and, b) guide other developing countries looking to emulate China’s urban development model.

The researchers discovered as follows:

  1. Many skyscrapers have been built in smaller cities and often further from Central Business Districts than residential equivalents. This pattern is the opposite of development in the U.S.
  2. As they delicately put it: “This suggests that factors outside of the competitive market framework could be at play.” This has affected not only the number of skyscrapers built but also many of their locations
  3. The research shows that government subsidies have been a big motivator and that this factor is most pronounced in smaller locales with more ambitious local officials
  4. In contrast to non-subsidized projects, subsidized ones provide little spill-over benefits on a 5~10-year view. Poor location, weak developers and an absence of supporting infrastructure being mostly to blame.

They conclude the analysis with the following zinger: “..the fact that such policies [Building tall buildings] work somewhere does not guarantee that they work everywhere.

Perhaps the same could be said about a few other economic policies?

You can review the work in full via the following link Building Tall, Falling Short.

Happy Sunday.

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