Research On The Relationship Between Urban Living Environment And Economic Development Of China’s Large And Medium-sized Cities

Since the reform and opening-up, China’s economy has experienced rapid growth in about 30 years, and people’s living standards are gradually improving. At the same time, the construction of each large and medium-sized city has made remarkable achievements. However, due to the blind pursuit for GDP and the ignorance of the reasonable protection for the environment and natural resources,urban living environment has also been destroyed. It has become a hot topic of concern that the improvement of urban living environment should be grown with the development of economy.Following the guidance of the people-oriented, comprehensive and integrated principle, this research firstly reconstructs two evaluation systems: the evaluation index system of urban living environment and the evaluation index system of economic development. Then, using the method of factor analysis, this paper takes China’s 35 typical large and medium-sized cities as examples, studies their urban living environment and economic development conditions from 2000 to 2012, and tries to analyze the real relationship between their urban living environment and economic development as objectively as possible. Comparing the analysis results,we find that some cities such as shenzhen, shanghai, beijing, guangzhou and so on,achieved the coordinated development between urban living environment and economic development, while the others did not reach that.Furthermore, we select 4 different kinds of city for example, employing co-integration analysis and regression analysis to study their relationship between urban living environment and economic development. The results indicate that the economic developments of the 35 cities are promoted not only by previous levels of economic development, but also by the improvement of urban living environment.However, the impact which economic development has on urban living environment is not significant. Some suggestions are put forward according to the results of empirical analysis, which will promote the coordinated development of urban living environment and economy.