An Empirical Study On The Relationship Among Urbanization, Trade Openness And Economic Growth In Liaoning Province

Being an accelerator of economic growth in the future, new urbanization could and also should be an inevitable choice, not only for China’s restructuring the economy, but also for Liaoning’s balanced development among different regions.Liaoning has made great achievements in urbanization construction since China’s reform and opening-up, the urbanization rate increased from 31.7% in 1978 to 65.7% in 2012, which was 13% higher than the national average at the year 2012; Meanwhile, Liaoning has developed into one of the largest provinces in east coastal region of China, with a GDP of ￥24.8 million, ranking it seventh among other provinces, and the level of opening-up improved continuously, with a total import and export trade of $103.99 billion, a 8.4% year-on-year increase.Is there a causal relationship among urbanization, trade openness and economic growth? Using some measurement methods such as Co-integration, Granger causality tests and IRF, this paper does an empirical study on the relationship among these three, according to the data from 1978 to 2012 in Liaoning. The findings include that: urbanization and trade openness show quite different impact on economic growth, while urbanization hinders economic growth to some extent, trade openness makes significant positive impact on economic growth; On the other hand, economic growth does promote urbanization, but the impact of economic growth on trade openness is not obvious. The virtuous circle among these three has not been formed.