Study On The Interrelationship Between Urbanization And Economic Development Of Xinjiang

American economist Stiglitz once said that the most two influential things happened in the21th century were high technologies of America and urbanization of China. Therefore, the impact of urbanization has been great on the economic development of both home and abroad. Urbanization and economic development are closely related; they restraint mutually, and at the same time reinforce mutually; urbanization can effectively promote economic density so that the economy can release more energy, whereas economic development is the base for an orderly developed urbanization. Northam also mentioned the intimate relationship between economic development and urbanization, which is the former, can boost the development of the latter. Economists such as Chenery also proved that there exists a rather obvious logarithmic correlation between the two, through which he explained the pulling function of economic development on urbanization during each stage. At present, majority of the scholars at home and abroad believe that the relationship between urbanization and economic development is the interrelationship of cause and effect, while few scholars have reservation on this claim, because they think that increasing the rate of urbanization can not necessarily promote economic development, and Latin American countries like Brazil and African region on the south Sahara are the best proof. These regions enjoy a high urbanization rate, however, the economy is not at all promoted by it, and there are a large number of unemployed population and ghettos. Without the support of economy, migration to big cities and ghettos will only bring challenge to local transportation, public security and environment, and even to economic development itself. Xinjiang is a minority area located in northwest of China which makes its economic development and urbanization quite particular. For instance, Xinjiang is currently facing with problems like low level of secondary and tertiary industry development, a large percentage of minority rural population and rising terrorist activities, which had never appeared in the mainland coastal developed areas. If the relationship between economic development and urbanization is not properly handled, the urban disease that has permeated the Latin countries will be repeat in Xinjiang, and bring grieve challenge to the sustainable development and prolonged stability of Xinjiang. Thus, closely studying the relationship between economic development and urbanization, systemically combing through the influencing mechanism, influencing factors and evaluating the coordination of those two are the main purposes of this dissertation.In the empirical study of this dissertation, theories from subjects such as regional economics, industrial economics, econometrics, geography, management will be applied in empirical study; combining theories with methods, software such as STATA, ARCGIS, GEODA, EVIEWS will be used to study cause and effect, and interactive mechanism between economic development and urbanization. In the former part, papers on the relationship between economic development and urbanization are thoroughly reviewed and classified, and exact definitions are given to relative concepts. In the latter part, which are empirical studies, visualization technology, exploratory spatial analysis method, VAR model, panel data simultaneous equation systems model and coupling coordinate degree model will be used to further study the cause and effect, interactive mechanism and coordination level between economic development and urbanization.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1) urbanization level of Xinjiang is currently lower than the northwest provinces and five minority autonomous regions, with characteristics such as "east high, west low; north high south low"; The space distribution of urban population is uneven; population in big cities like Urumqi is oversized, while small cities in the north and south are rather small; urbanization level of each region is spatially connected, which is characterized as "H-H"、"H-L"、"L-L"、"L-H ". Among them, economic belt on the Northern Slope of Tianshan Mountains such as Urumqi displays the accumulation character as " H-H ", while Southern Xinjiang displays " L-L " accumulation character.(2) Pearson Correlation Coefficient shows that there is a rather strong correlation between economic development and urbanization. Through Granger causality test, it is found that there exists a unidirectional cause and effect between per capita GDP and population urbanization, economic development is the Granger reason of Xinjiang urbanization, while cause and effect of the two are not that statistically obvious. The results of impulse response function and variance analysis of VAR model show that urbanization had a positive impact on its own lasting stability during1978-2011, but its impact on economic development was not much obvious; the impact of per capita GDP on both itself and urbanization was rather obvious. The results of impulse response function and variance analysis remain consistent. Results of variance analysis show that the impact of economic development on itself was gradually weakening, but on urbanization was gradually strengthening.(3) Results from panel data simultaneous equation systems model show that physical capital and human capital have a rather positive effect on Xinjiang’s economic development, and urbanization has more impact on human capital than physical capital. The increase of per capita GDP and level of agriculture mechanization are helpful in promoting the population urbanization of Xinjiang; Urban-rural income gap hinder the increase of population urbanization level. There is a considerable gap in coefficient of regression model between south, north and east regions of Xinjiang (4) According to the coupling coordinate degree model of economic system and urbanization system designed in this dissertation, it can be found that the economic system and urbanization system of Xinjiang, during1990-2010, has experienced first low coordination degree, then medium coordination degree and at last, high coordination degree.