Urban Growth Patterns And Determinants: Evidence From China

Since our reform and opening policy, we have witnessed remarkable development in Chinese cities, with both city quantity and urban population increasing rapidly. The agglomeration effect accumulated in cities has dramatically promoted urban productivity and improved human life. Cities have displayed a fast growth trend in terms of quality and quantity simultaneously. In the past thirty years, fast urban growth has become one of radical characteristics of the deeply changing society. Fast progress in urban economies in western countries has inspired more and more scholars to pursue in this area both in respects of theory and practice, while in China studies in urban growth are relatively slow. Urban growth is an important branch in the urban economic system and it contains complicated and multi-level economic and social problems. The paper analyzed urban growth patterns in China and corresponding determinants mainly from respects of economic growth and population growth while taking spatial growth and labor productivity growth into account too and testified their growth convergence around the country and in each economic region, through which to lead a new point of view in urban growth in China.Analysis on urban population, economic and productivity growth and their coordination for 206 prefecture level cities from 1990 to 2005 revealed that gross domestic production per urban building area had increased, the population bearing capacity of urban land had decreased and growth in urban productivity had exceeded homeochronous population growth, which showed that urban growth still hadn't cast off from patterns that depended heavily on excessive land resource consumption and that human capital had still contributed little to urban growth. In addition, we found that obvious disparity exists among and within regions. While urban population growth is found to be divergent, which we called a divergent growth pattern, urban economic growth displayed a marked beta convergent trend, which can be called a convergent growth pattern. As for different growth patterns for different regions, the government should shape its policies to promote cities to convert into a growth pattern that is featured with resource intensive use and further promote coordinated growth among regions.On basis of present related studies, the paper established a new systematic urban growth model and constructed an analysis employing data from 206 prefecture level cities from 1990 to 2005 in China. The results revealed that government fiscal expenditure and foreign direct investment had positive effect on urban population and economic growth, urban salary had impacted urban population growth and economic growth in opposite directions and urban industrial structure only impacted urban economic growth. While elements in urban public facility and environment had little relationship with urban growth, robustness test showed that as city develops, their impact would emerge stage by stage and finally become essential elements for urban competitiveness.