A Study On The Relationship Between China’s Urbanization Rate And The Level Of Economic Development

China’s level of urbanization has reached51.27%till2010, at the same time, China’s GDP per capita is already over$5,444.79, but it is only$940.44to the measure of the dollar in1964.30years after reform and opening up30, China’s urbanization and economic development both have made tremendous progress. All along, urbanization is a hot topic of China’s academic research and discussion, the discussion focused mainly on whether the level of urbanization in China is behind the level of economic development or not. And it develops into three different views:the theory of urbanization lagging behind theory, the theory of basic coordination and the recessive ultra urbanization theory. And the view that China’s urbanization lags far behind economic development is supported by the majority of scholars, they generally believe that China’s urbanization rate lags behind the economic development level about10percentage points. Throughout these studies and discussions, the criteria of degree of urbanization and whether the urbanization lag or not in China mainly uses the index of correspondence of urbanization rate and GDP per capita from Chener’s "general development of the model" in1975. This thesis starts from this standard, re-start the discussion on whether China’s urbanization rate is lagging behind economic development or not.The thesis first discusses the Chenery standard applicability expand and finds that when applied to determine whether our current level of urbanization is lagging behind or not should pay attention to three aspects: First, it should translate the present value of per capita GDP data into per capita GDP in1964as the base year. Second, technology development and social progress will change the correlation coefficient between per capita GDP and the urbanization rate in different time, its correlation shows a progressively smaller trend with time, so it should be fixed with the latest recent the data. Third, the difference of the size of the national population will lead to difference of the complexity of urbanization realization, the correlation of GDP per capita and the level of urbanization is smaller than countries with smaller population size, and therefore we should only use big country data to correct the Chenery model results. Only after these correction of Chenery model results, we can apply it to research China’s current problem.After re-discussion of the criteria, the following discussion is on the accuracy of the statistics accuracy of China’s urbanization rate, mainly from the statistical coverage of China’s urban population, cost to live in cities and as well as family planning policy. And we find that these three factors will lead to China’s urba nization rate undervalued. Thus we use the Bureau of Statistics of the sixth census data to make amendments to the statistics of China’s urbanization rate, and build a flow cost-benefit model of rural to analysis and explain mechanism of the real state price impact on the level of urbanization in China.The results show that:China does not exist the problem of seriously lagging behind the level of urbanization, the urbanization level is within the a reasonable range. Taking into account China’s urbanization rate is undervalued, China’s urbanization level is actually consistent with the level of economic development. Even some periods of China’s economic development, such as time before2004, there may be a certain degree of level ahead in urbanization.