Search

As rural decline sweeps the world and draws public attention, it becomes necessary to consider the relationship between urbanization and rural development. The paper investigates this topic in China for the period 1989–2018. The research results find positive contribution of urbanization to rural economy in the research period but with a decreasing tendency. Compared to less developed areas, rural economy of developed regions has become less dependent on cities and can flourish in a larger context with the support of modern transportation and telecommunication technologies. However, those peripheral rural areas tend to face continuous and large‐scale rural–urban migration which has aggravated rural decline. Rural economic growth helps to decrease rural outmigration and people will stay in their hometown with available job opportunities to raise their families and maintain livelihood. The paper proposes balance‐friendly urbanization structure and diversified rural economy to improve rural resilience to meet the challenge of rural decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the roles of physical capital, human capital, and social capital in China's economic growth during the reform period 1981-2010. Empirical estimation confirms that physical capital and human capital contribute to the economic growth, probably due to the capital accumulation and the improvement of labor productivity. The impact of social capital turns from being insignificant in the 1980s and the 1990s to be positive in the 2000s, suggesting its rising importance in recent decades. A declining role of physical capital in the economic growth in China from 1990s to 2000s is also found. The findings hold for several additional robustness checks, including focusing on longer term determinants of the economic growth, subregional analysis, and endogeneity. Furthermore, the foreign direct investment inflows and adjustment of economic ownership structure are also important for economic growth in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a new way of decomposing regional inequality. It divides the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei metropolitan region into three sets of districts in terms of the urban-rural resource flows: urban, peri-urban, and peripheral areas. Unlike the administrative divisions, these three sets of districts show how resource flows and agglomerates at the regional level. The paper decomposes regional inequality according to the three sets of districts. The paper's findings show that regional inequality decreased between 1990 and 1994, after which it remained steady. The study, for the first time, brings peri-urban areas into a regional decomposition analysis, and contributes to the understanding of urban-rural resource flows and inequality changes at the regional level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]