Welfare Effects of Township Consolidation Policies in Shrinking Counties: Intergenerational Heterogeneity and Public Service Accessibility

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-699-9_62How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Township consolidation; shrinking counties; public service accessibility; intergenerational heterogeneity; welfare effects

Abstract

The policy of removing townships and merging towns is an important administrative means for China to cope with the population contraction of counties, but its impact on the welfare of residents still lacks a systematic assessment. This study takes the contracted county area where the evacuation of townships and towns was implemented from 2005 to 2020 as the research object. Using county-level panel data and public service facility spatial data, the double difference (DID) method is used to evaluate the causal effect of the withdrawal policy on the accessibility of residents’ public services, and focuses on intergenerational heterogeneity. The study found that the withdrawal policy generally significantly reduced the accessibility of residents’ public services (ATT = -0.34, p < 0.001), but the intergenerational difference was significant - the elderly group (≥60 years old) suffered the greatest negative impact (ATT = -0.52), and their medical and administrative service travel distance increased by 5.2 km and 6.3 km respectively; the educational accessibility of the child group was particularly prominent (the travel distance increased by 3.1 km); the working-age population was least affected. Spatial analysis shows that the accessibility of administrative services has deteriorated the most, and the decline in market accessibility is the most limited. The conclusion of the study shows that the policy of removing townships and merging towns has produced significant unfairness in welfare distribution while pursuing administrative efficiency. The design of compensation mechanism for disadvantaged groups should become the core topic of policy optimization.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Siyuan Liu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/02
TI  - Welfare Effects of Township Consolidation Policies in Shrinking Counties: Intergenerational Heterogeneity and Public Service Accessibility
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 4th International Conference on Digital Economy and Management Science (CDEMS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 575
EP  - 583
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-699-9_62
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-699-9_62
ID  - Liu2026
ER  -