Urban Development Of China In Transitional Period-An Analysis Based On Institutional Change

Through 30 years of opening up and reform, China's economy, society, cities and environment has undergone dramatic changes. We have witnessed great economic achievements, the remarkable improvement of people's living standard and the rapid development of China's urbanization, while environmental problems also become increasingly prominent. In academia, this stage is seen as China's transitional period, of course, now is still in this period, and there is much research of this period in various subjects. Undoubtedly, the mainstream research of this period focus on the institutional change, including economics, sociology, political science, geography and many other subjects. In this paper, the author attempts to analysis the impact of institutional change in China for urban economic with economics and geography methodology.Firstly, the author defines the concepts of institution and institutional change, and summarizes the progress in urban research with institutional perspective in China. The author found that the quantitative studies of institutional change are mainly from economics, and most of them adopt the state level data or provincial level data as analytic date, whose concerns primarily focus on the differences between the east and west of China, while many scholars in geography give attention to qualitative analysis, and a large number of their articles are based on the assumption—institutional change is equilibrium.Then, the author review the main contents of institutional change in China since reform, and selects some variables to do quantitative studies, including spatial and level impact of institutional change for urban economic growth, the spatial and level distribution of institutional change and the category of institutional change.The results show that the capital investment always plays an important role in development of Chinese cities, and the significant level of the rate of private employees in non-agricultural population is very high both in space and level, the utilized foreign capital in the local GDP only has high significance in east China and big cities, while the government budget expenditure in the local GDP always has low significance. Furthermore, the imbalance of institutional change, in China, is obvious both in space and level, and the government budget expenditure in the local GDP has the best degree of balance, then is the rate of private employees in non-agricultural population and utilized foreign capital in the local GDP. Finally, though category analysis, the author doesn't found significant preference of institutional variable in space and level.