Research On Rural-urban Income Gap In The Process Of Urbanization In Anhui Province

Countries all over the world share a similarity that its individual economic development undergoes such problems as urbanization and rural-urban income gap. So far, it has been a consensus in the academic that the expansion of rural-urban income gap accelerates urbanization, while it is still uncertain that whether the increasing level of urbanization has effects on rural-urban income gap. Fixing on Anhui province, this paper studies the historical evolvement and development features of Anhui’s rural-urban income gap and urbanization, which is carried out on a basis of scientific materials about this issue. Besides, it quantitatively analyzes the impacts of the proportion of urban population, urban and rural labor productivity ratio, the rate of industrialization and the employed proportion in the tertiary industry on the rural-urban income gap. Then based on the empirical results, this essay puts forward some suggestions on relative policy to the improvement in the level of urbanization and narrowing the income gap between citizens and countrymen. Urban development strategies in Anhui province, at present as well as in the short future, are to focus on speeding up urbanization and constructing a new socialized village, for the level of urbanization and residents’ income is one of the key measurement aspects. Objective and rational analysis on the level of urbanization and residents’income plays an active role in the exploring for the ways to improve the level of urbanization and to narrow the rural-urban income gap. In turn, it is able to effectively promote both the city and county to develop.The main research points and author’s conclusions in this essay are as follows:First, though the investigation of the urbanization process in Anhui province since the reform and opening-up policy, which was issued the past three decades ago, we can see that urbanization in Anhui province has made important achievements, but it also leaves a large number of problems that can not be ignored. For example, the number of cities increases and the level of urbanization is gradually enhanced, yet it is still below the national average; urbanization lags behind industrialization; tertiary industry has hindered the development of urbanization and the obvious internal differences in the development of urbanization, etc.Second, the rural-urban income gap in Anhui province has experienced four stages, that is, narrow-picked up-narrow again-rise with fluctuations, showing a gradual upward trend with the economic development in general. On the one hand, both urban and rural incomes in Anhui are in the continued growth. On the other hand, the income gap between urban and rural residents is also expanded. Meanwhile, the trend of rural-urban income gap in Anhui province displays a certain degree of uniqueness:inconsistencies in the process of economic development, constrained by the regional development, uneven economic development among cities, unbalanced economic development in different areas, etc. And these factors make the rural-urban income gap constantly widened. All the above-mentioned show that the speed of rural economic development is required to go up, which is an urgent problem to be solved by Anhui province as a major agricultural province.Third, it talks about the dynamic relationship between urbanization and urban and rural incomes in Anhui province, which is considered as the key point of this thesis. In chapter three and chapter four this essay will make a systematical analysis on the variables of urbanization, per capital disposable income of urban residents, per capital net income of rural residents, the rate of industrialization, the proportion of the working population in the tertiary industry, with the assist of IT measurement software named eviews. The empirical results suggest that, in Anhui province urbanization rate has a long-term coordinative relationship with rural and urban incomes, thus, it admits their associated connection. However, error correction model results illustrate that despite their coordinative relationship, the variables will still have some significant fluctuations in a short term, which disclose that it is not only a factor that leads to urban and rural residents’income growth. At the same time, by use of pulse functions, we can find out how much the variables of urbanization may influence rural and urban residents’income. Both pulse analysis and variance decomposition analysis show that the income gap between urban and rural areas is bond to further expand due to the existence of dual economic structure, and that the gap is expected to narrow with the help of the development of tertiary industry.