Accounting for China's urbanization

Qin Chen and Zheng Song

China Economic Review, 2014, vol. 30, issue C, 485-494

Abstract: It is widely acknowledged that large-scale urbanization plays a pivotal role in China's miraculous economic growth over the past two decades. Yet many of the basic statistics and facts remain disputable. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, based on the publicly available 2000 and 2010 census data, plus some auxiliary information from other sources, we develop an accounting method to back out the scale and composition of China's urbanization. We find that urbanization accounts for 80.4% of the total urban population growth of 211 million in the 2000s. Moreover, more than half of the urbanized population, about 85.6 million, is due to rural–urban migration. Our findings suggest that rural–urban migration increased by two thirds from the 1990s to 2000s, while the population urbanized by land reclassification is roughly the same across the two periods.

Keywords: Census; China's urbanization; Population dynamics; Rural–urban migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C82 J11 J61 J82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:30:y:2014:i:c:p:485-494

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2014.07.005

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