Accounting for Chinaʹs urbanization

It is widely acknowledged that large-scale urbanization plays a pivotal role in Chinaʹs miraculous economic growth over the past two decades. Yet many of the basic statistics and facts remain disputable. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, based on the publicly available 2000 and 2010 census data, plus some auxiliary information from other sources, we develop an accounting method to back out the scale and composition of Chinaʹs urbanization. We find that urbanization accounts for 80.4% of the total urban population growth of 211 million in the 2000s. Moreover, more than half of the urbanized population, about 85.6 million, is due to rural–urban migration. Our findings suggest that rural–urban migration increased by two thirds from the 1990s to 2000s, while the population urbanized by land reclassification is roughly the same across the two periods.