Establishment Of Urbanization Quality’s Evaluation System And Spatial Econometric Analysis

Ever since reform and opening up, we have made remarkable achievements in China’s urbanization movement. However, it’s our excessive pursuit of the cities’ number and size that leads to uneven urbanization quality of our city. Meanwhile, the urbanization level of the central and western China is not as good as that of the eastern coastal area. Hence, it is necessary to research the spatial interaction of China’s urbanization quality, so as to seize the economic growth resulting from urbanization in a better way.Firstly, based on urbanization definition posed by researchers with various discipline background, this paper summarize the urbanization definition in three contexts:larithmics, economics and sociology. In order to establish urbanization quality’s evaluation system, this paper selects27variables and analyzes these variable with factor analysis, from which we’ve finally obtained the yearly factor score of every city. Secondly, this paper researches the overall spatial autocorrelation and partial spatial autocorrelation via global Moran I and local Moran I respectively. Owing to the spatial autocorrelation that we’ve discovered by Moran I, we establish the spatial autoregressive panel data model and spatial error panel data model, with urbanization quality factor score as the explained variable and another five explanatory variables including GDP per capita, gross fixed asset formation per capita, urbanization rate, expenditure rate in science and education, staff and workers. With the Lagrange’s multiplier, we select the spatial autoregressive panel data model with time-fixed effect. And we obtain the estimation of the regression coefficients by Maximum Likelihood Estimation, with which we analyze how the urbanization quality of any city is affected by five explanatory variables and that of ambient cities. Last but not least, we calculate the spatial spillover effect of the five explanatory variables, so as to study the indirect effect between each of the five explanatory variables and the urbanization quality of ambient cities.By means of sorting the factor score of economic development and urbanization quality respectively, we’ve draw a conclusion that, the urbanization quality of the eastern coastal area is better than that of the central and western China, just like the spatial distribution of China’s economic development. The computation of the global Moran I and local Moran I show that, the phenomenon of urbanization quality spatial agglomeration doesn’t emerge in terms of the whole country, but it does exist in terms of partial regions. In this regard, most of the cities whose urbanization quality is good, are located in the eastern coastal area, while most the cities with poor urbanization quality located in the central and western China. According to the estimation of the spatial autoregressive panel data model with time-fixed effect, we come to the conclusion that the urbanization quality of any city is partially decided by all the five explanatory variables and the urbanization quality of the surrounding cities. Meanwhile, the urbanization quality of any city is affected by the five explanatory variables of the surrounding cities indirectly, although the effect is not as remarkable as the effect of the cities’ own explanatory variables.