The Research Of China’s Urban-Rural Structure And Urbanization

As the supporting role of external demands for China’s high economic growth increasingly reduced, domestic demand will become the most important driving force to keep China’s economy growing at a good clip.Premier Li Keqiang once said that the urbanization is the greatest potential to expand domestic demand. For the last30years of reform and opening-up, China’s urbanization rate has risen from less than20%to more than50%, and the urbanization progress is significantly fast with a large number of fanners rushing into cities and towns, who continuously provide cheap labors to our country’s economic development. Demographic dividend has become the important pillar of China’s economic take-off. But the quality of urbanization in our country is deficiency. The process of urbanization did not narrow the gaps between the urban areas and rural areas;on the contrary, it made contradictions become increasingly acute. In order to advance the urbanization process from the aspects of both quality and quantity, this paper will analyzes both the mechanism and influence factors of urbanization deeply.After reviewing the relevant theories, this paper builds a theoretical model which is suitable to analyze the urbanization process in China, on the base of the new economic geography theory and the urban&rural dual structure theory as well as on the base of the situation of our country. Through theoretical analysis and empirical test, this paper obtained the following conclusions:Firstly, the driving forces of the urbanization come from four aspects, that is, the increasing of the share of industrial goods in residents’ consumption structure, the decreasing of industrial products’transaction costs, the reduction of arable land and the advancement in the degree of scale of agricultural production. On the other side, there are five aspects that block the process of urbanization, that is, more residents’ attentions paid on living houses, a higher level of house prices, the expansion of the urban lands’scale, the reduction of agricultural products’transaction costs and the discrimination on the household registration. Within the driving powers, the most considerable factor is the change of resident consumption structure and the others’ influences are relatively small.Secondly, the factors which can improve the social welfares are the share of industrial goods in residents’ consumption structure, more residents’attentions paid on living houses, the improvement of the living environment in rural areas, the decreasing of industrial products’ transaction costs, the reduction of household price level the advancement in the degree of scale of agricultural production, and technology advancements. Conversely, the increasing of populations, the reduction of arable land, and the expansion of the urban lands’scale can reduce the welfare of the residents.Thirdly, the gaps of actual welfare are slightly less than the differences of the nominal incomes between urban and rural residents. The discrimination on the household registration can increase the urban citizens’welfares while it reduces the migrant workers’and peasants’welfares, and the reduction of the later are far above the increasing the former. At the same time, the increasing effect is becoming weakened and more badly, the decreasing effect of the later gradually becomes enhanced. Compared to urban citizens, migrant workers and peasants are more sensitive to the discrimination on the household registration, and the adjustment by their own weakens the influence of the household register discrimination.Fourthly, according to the year of2011’s level, if the discrimination on the household registration can totally eliminated, the actual urbanization rate will increase by more than twenty percent, and the level of farmers and migrant workers’ welfares can be nearly doubled, but the urban citizens’welfare will reduce by about one quarter.Fifthly, the change of the urban system has little effect on the urbanization level. Urban expansion mode can be affected by the residents’ consumption structure, enterprises’ market forces as well as the industrial and agricultural products transaction costs. Currently the towns’gather forces for enterprises are not strong enough in most areas of China.Finally, based on the above conclusions, this paper gives the corresponding policy recommendations. By summarizing, this paper fingers out that the urbanization is a systematic project, and when we promote urbanization, we need to consider both the development of urban and rural development as well as the connection between the two. In addition we also need to take into account urban system construction and urban development pattern.During the theoretical research, this paper creatively introduces the hypothesis of the decreasing return to scale of agricultural production and of the limited cultivated land. As a result, it makes the theoretical analysis framework more suitable for the analysis of the conditions in the developing countries such as our country. Furthermore, through the investigation of the logistics transportation patterns in the real world, this paper concludes the new economy model to deal with problem of the production transportation, under which the economic space in the theoretical research is extended from1-dimensional to2-dimensional.Urbanization is a very important and very complex research topic. This paper obtains many meaningful conclusions on this topic. But there are still plenty of conclusions that can be researched and more studies on this subject are needed to be done in the future.