The Main Propulsion Factors And Estimation For The Urbanization

The level of urbanization is an important indicator to measure the economic andsocial development of a country or region. Since the policy of the reform and openingup, the level of urbanization in China has been greatly improved and the first time in2011, the urban population is higher than the rural population. The urbanization has alsobecome a hot academic topic. But these literatures, studying the urbanization, generallyconcentrated in the traditional time-series data and panel data and ignored the spacesimilarity or differences, which may result in the biased result. In this paper, byintroducing the methods of spatial econometrics which empirically analyzed therelationship between the level of urbanization and its influencing factors, more reliableresults were obtained. Firstly, the paper used the Moran’I Index to calculate thecorrelation of the urbanization among different provinces from the year2005to2010and the results showed that there is a significant positive correlation among the level ofurbanization in China, which mean that the spatial distribution is not random and thereis an inevitable connection. More generally, the region of high level of urbanizationtends to share the same border with the region of relatively high level of urbanization;the region of low level of urbanization tends to share the same border with the provinceof a relatively low level of urbanization. Then, the article empirically analyzed therelationship between the level of urbanization and its influencing factors from thecross-sectional data and the panel data. In the study of the cross-sectional data, thepaper not only established the ordinary least square model, the spatial lag model and thespatial error model to analyze the spatial dependence but also compared the pros andcons of the models to choose a more accurate model to analyze the spatial characters ofthe urbanization. In the study of the panel data, the dissertation flexibly used the frontiermethod in spatial econometric methods, which could overcome the defect of thetraditional panel econometric methods, to estimate the relationship of the31provincesin China between the year of2005and2010. And the study found that the spatial paneleconometric model not only fit better but also explained better in the level of theurbanization and there was a positive correlation of the urbanization in China, whichsignified that raising the level of the urbanization in adjacent areas can drive the level inurbanization of the region. Furthermore, raising the level of the education anddeveloping the tertiary could significantly promote the process of the new urbanization. Considering the spatial correlation among the urbanization in China, we should guidethe process the urbanization from within the region or even across the country instead ofsolely relying on the power of the provinces or the cities. So neighboring provinces andcities should join forces together, cooperate and overall regional coordinateddevelopment and give full play to the neighboring cities of complementary functions toachieve the development of regional economic integration and drive the all-rounddevelopment of the regional economy.