Spatial Statistical Research On China’s Urbanization And Its Impact On The Economic Growth

The construction of new-type urbanization has strategic significance in the process of China’s modernization, and it has close relationship with the economic growth and people’s life. In the current complicated international situation, expanding domestic demand is the fundamental way to improve the quality of economic development. Urbanization is the new powerful engine for domestic demand expansion and economic growth. However, the imbalance of regional urbanization and economic development in China restricts the transformation of China’s economic structure. Based on the above, it is meaningful to research urbanization and its impact upon economy under the spatial perspective.This paper first introduces the scientific connotation of urbanization in theory, especially how to correctly understand the new-type urbanization strategy. Then from the demand perspective, it explaines in detail that the potential demand of urban consumption and investment drives economy growth and improves economic structure. Based on the theoretical analysis,an evaluation index system which contains four dimensions of population, economy, life quality and ecological environment, is established to measure composite scores of the urbanization level in various provinces using the entropy method. Besides, this paper has carried out a statistical analysis on the level of economic development between 1978 and 2013, from the aspects of total consumption, investment and industrial structure.Considering the ignorance of spatial correlation effect among variables may lead to inaccurate results, we made an analysis on spatial autocorrelation of the urbanization, consumption, investment, and economy level from 2005 to 2013. The test on spatial autocorrelation confirmes that there are significant effects of regional agglomeration: the eastern coastal provinces gathered with high-level, for example the city of Beijing and Tianjin, and the province of Zhejiang and Jiangsu; the western provinces, as Xizang, Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, gatherd with low-level as well.Then we build spatial lag models to research the influence of urbanization on economic development. The results of Empirical anlysis show that the proportion of urban population has a significant role in economic growth, but this effect is decreasing; nowadays consumption is the most fundamental motivator to expand domestic demand, the role of investment is not as significant as consumption. Finally,some reasonable suggestions on the spatial effect, consumption, investment, urban population and government functions were put forward to promote the construction of urbanization and economy.