The Study Of Urban Development Mechanism

Urban development has been a critical issue in the study of urban economics and regional economics. Since 1980s, the rural-to-urban shift becomes one of the most important economic phenomena with the rapid development of Chinese cities, and the rural population will continue to flow into the cities in a long period of time. How cities develop and how can they develop faster and better are a field deserve much research.This paper focuses on the economic effects of urbanization and the relationship between enterprise agglomeration and urban development. Firstly, in this thesis, research into urban development at home and abroad is summarized and commented. Through the summarization of previous studies, some concepts which appear in this paper are defined. Chapter III uses theoretical analysis to analyze the reason believing the enterprise agglomeration promotes urban development. Chapter IV builds up the mathematical model to analyze the process of enterprise agglomeration and urban development. Chapter V utilizes the knowledge of econometrics for empirical tests. The last chapter summarizes the entire research and outlines the prospects in the future.The main conclusions of this thesis are as follows: Various levels of agglomeration effects produced by enterprise agglomeration affect different stages of city development. The enterprise's internal economical scale plays an important roll in the formation of a new city. The localized economy effects generated by the agglomeration of the same industry promote the development and growth of the city, while the economic effect of urbanization plays a crucial role in urban development when the city is developed to a certain stage. The economic effect of urbanization can increase productivity of cities and the utility level of urban residents, attract businesses and population inflow, and thus brings development and growth of cities.The empirical analysis of urban population, wage levels, and per capita output in Ningbo shows that the urban development in Ningbo experiences high economic effects of urbanization. As the scale of the city expanses, the labor productivity of Ningbo also increases. Data from 1989 to 2001shows that the labor productivity of Ningbo will increase by 2.32% each time when the scale of the city is 1% up, which demonstrates that the economies of urbanization in Ningbo is prominent. That is, the expansion of city scale, indeed, contributes to its productivity growth. A city will benefit from enterprise agglomeration in economic interests, which definitely leads to urban development.The empirical test based on the comparison between the number of enterprises in Ningbo and its urban non-agricultural population indicates that there is a strong positive correlation between the number of enterprises and the urban population: the larger the number of enterprises in a city, the larger its urban population is. Therefore, enterprise agglomeration plays a positive role in the expansion of city scale and urban development.