The relationship between urbanization and economic growth has been perplexing. In this paper, we identify the pattern of global change and the correlation of urbanization and economic growth, using cross-sectional, panel estimation and geographic information systems (GIS) methods. The analysis has been carried out on a global geographical scale, while the timescale of the study spans the last 3...

On 16 March 2014, the State Council of China launched its first urbanization planning initiative dubbed “National New Urbanization Planning (2014–2020)” (NNUP). NNUP put forward 20 urban agglomerations and a sustainable development approach aiming to transform traditional Chinese urbanization to sustainable new urbanization. This study quantitatively evaluates the level of sustainability of the...

This paper investigates the potential causal relationship(s) between China's urbanization and income inequality since the start of the economic reform. Based on the economic theory of urbanization and income distribution, we analyze the annual time series of China's urbanization rate and Gini index from 1978 to 2014. The results show that urbanization has an immediate alleviating effect on inco...

Cities are at the centre of Asia-Pacific’s economic growth and development. They provide the environment and social milieu in which more and more people live. Urban areas in the region, though containing around 42 percent of its population, account for 80 percent of the region’s GDP1. Urbanization in Asia and the Pacific is proceeding at a scale and speed unprecedented in human history. It took...

Urban dwellers are rapidly becoming a majority of the population. Most of them live in developing countries, and an ever-higher proportion in the biggest cities. Most of the world’s largest cities are now in developing countries, and they are growing to sizes never before experienced. The urban population is growing several times as fast as in the rural areas, either through natural growth (the...

Today, half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. By 2050, 70 percent of the population will be urban. India has been witnessing massive urbanization. Over the six decades since independence, India’s population grew three-fold from 350 million in 1947 to 1027 million in the year in 2001. During the same period, the urban population grew almost 4.6 fold as fast – from 62.4 million to 2...

Urbanization profoundly alters biological systems; yet the predictability of responses to urbanization based on key biological traits, the repeatability of these patterns among cities, and how the impact of urbanization on biological systems varies as a function of background climatic conditions remain unknown. We use insects as a focal system to review the major patterns of responses to urbani...