Research On The Effect Of Urbanization On Regional Development Gap In China

The regional development gap is a hot topic in current research and is also the focus of China's regional policies.After the reform and opening-up,China's economy has developed rapidly,and at the same time it has entered the process of urbanization.Behind the fast-growing economy,China's regional development gap is gradually widening,the development focus is shifting to the eastern coastal areas,and there are obvious differences in the development of various regions in China.Since then,the national policy has been committed to regional coordinated development for a long time,and has successively implemented relevant policies such as the development of the western region,the rise of the central region,the revitalization of the old industrial base in northeast China,all the way around and precise poverty alleviation to reduce the regional development gap and realize regional coordinated development.Urbanization is the only way for the country to develop.In recent years,the country has made great efforts to construct a new type of urbanization.Reviewing the relevant theories on regional development gap,Williamson elaborated the "inverted U" hypothesis from a regional perspective,revealing that the regional development gap will gradually shorten over the inflection point after reaching a certain stage with the continuous increase of economic development.The content of this paper is to study whether the regional development gap in China in the past 30 years conforms to the "inverted U" hypothesis.Domestic research on regional development gap mainly focuses on the measurement and convergence of regional development gap and the relationship between economic growth and regional development gap.In the process of urbanization,the main content of this paper is how urbanization affects regional development and whether it can promote the narrowing of regional development gap.In the empirical study,in the first part,according to the previous theory of studying regional development gap,it is found that different calculation indexes and methods may lead to inconsistent results of the gap.In this paper,the per capita GDP recognized by most researchers is used as the index to calculate the regional development gap.In the calculation method,the relative range,coefficient of variation and Gini coefficient are used.After calculating the three indicators,through descriptive statistics and structural similarity,the similarity of the three indicators is analyzed respectively.The results show that the trends of the three indicators are basically the same,all of them rise first and then fall.There are slight differences in the year when the inflection point occurs,but the differences are very close.In the second part,according to past research,the proportion of urban population to the total population is taken as the index of urbanization,and the urbanization rate and the three gap indexes are simply analyzed statistically to judge whether the data need to be preprocessed by logarithm,etc.,then the uniformity of each sequence is checked,and then the urbanization index,relative range,coefficient of variation and Gini coefficient are respectively brought into the "inverted U" hypothesis test to test,and whether there is a non-linear relationship between urbanization index and regional development gap is preliminarily checked.In the third part,STR models are established for relative range,coefficient of variation,Gini coefficient and urbanization index respectively.In the selection of AR partial lag order,different lag orders are selected to enter the model due to inconsistent ranking results of linear partial models AIC,SC and other criteria.Seven models are established respectively.The models are compared and the relatively better model is selected.Finally,the modeling results of different gap indexes are compared and the inflection point estimation is selected for better explanation and analysis.The results show that the regional development gap calculated by the relative range,coefficient of variation and Gini coefficient all rises first and then falls,and the increase speed of the gap is relatively slow at the stage of increase.After crossing the inflection point,the gap drops rapidly,and is lower than the initial value,with a slight rebound at the end.In the test of the "inverted U" hypothesis,it is found that the regional development gap between 1990 and 2017 conforms to the "inverted U" curve,and there is a nonlinear relationship between the regional development gap and urbanization.In STR model,the non-linear transformation mechanism of urbanization to regional development gap is further studied.Before 1999,urbanization had only a linear effect on the regional development gap.At this time,urbanization was in a "low system" state on the regional development gap.Since 1999,urbanization has played a non-linear role in the regional development gap.At this time,the role of the linear part is higher than that of the non-linear part.When the urbanization rate equals 46.2610,the impact of urbanization on the non-linear part of regional development gap is higher than that of the linear part.In 2017,the conversion function is equal to 0.9915,which is about 1.At this time,the impact of urbanization on regional development gap will enter a "high system" state.Based on this,this paper puts forward the following suggestions on the relevant policies of the state to promote the coordinated development of the region.First,China can spatially combine poverty alleviation policies with urbanization in terms of policies,accelerate the progress of urban-rural integration near cities and towns,and build new villages in remote areas to promote urbanization.Second,innovation should be made in the existing macro supporting policies for coordinated regional development.Third,promote new urbanization,promote population flow into cities and towns,and promote coordinated regional development.