The Research Progress Of Population Urbanization In Development Economics

China’s urbanization, at the ratio of above 50% before long, has entered into the intermediate stage of acceleration, which will have great impact on economic development. Reviews on this topic abound, while a systematic literature review has not been found. These reviews often summarize urbanization from one perspective, usually via making simple amendments based on a well-known analyses framework or a complete model. As a result, they may be trapped in narrow analyses paradigm without taking hints of a broad horizen.This dissertation will make a systematic and comprehensive literature review based on the history and transformation trend of economic analysis. A review of the economic history of urbanization suggests that the relationship between urbanization and economic development is diversified in different countries; however, it is not well supported by specific statistic analyses. A review of theoretical works helps find out that most of these literatures do not consider transaction cost in their analyses. Specifically, the researches about China’s urbanization mainly focus on policies and applications.Three issues demonstrated in this dissertation are based on the economic analysis and its brief history: why urbanization belongs to development economics first; why literature review is carried out from the perspective of development economics; and the economic analysis is transforming to the paradigm of positive transaction cost. The dissertation extends the development economics with zero transaction cost to the paradigm of positive transaction cost and provides consistent explanations of the diversification in different countries in the relationship between urbanization and economic development with positive transaction cost.This dissertation contributes to the systematic literature review about Chinese urbanization in development economics, consolidating a research foundation in urbanization field. Because of the limited time, it seems impossible to include all literatures in the urbanization field, apart from a lack of empirical research on this topic. The research on this problem will be further continued in the future for its theoretical and empirical significance.