Study on Comprehensive Evaluation of New Urbanization Level in Qinghai Province

Chaofan WU

School of Finance and Economics, Qinghai University, Xining 810016, China

Abstract The new type of urbanization has always been regarded as an important force to promote economic and social development and an important means to realize agricultural modernization. In order to analyze the problems existing in the process of urbanization in Qinghai Province, 5 second-level indexes and 17 third-level indexes were constructed to establish a comprehensive evaluation index system of urbanization development level, and the entropy method was used to analyze the urbanization level of Qinghai Province from 1999 to 2018.The results show that the urbanization of Qinghai Province can be divided into three stages: in the first stage (from 1999 to 2005), the urbanization of Qinghai Province was basically in a stage of slow development; in the second stage (from 2006 to 2011), the urbanization of Qinghai Province was in the stage of slow growth; in the third stage (from 2012 to 2018), urbanization in Qinghai Province was in the stage of rapid and high-quality development.

Key words New urbanization, Entropy method, Qinghai Province

1 Introduction

Qinghai Province is located in the northeast of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and falls into the category of the western inland provinces. By the end of 2018, the urbanization rate of Qinghai Province was 54.47%, while that of the whole country in the same period was 59.58%, with 5 percentage points lower than the national average urbanization rate. The total land area of Qinghai Province is 717 500 km, and there is still 49.95 kmafter excluding 218 000 kmof nature reserve area, but the total population is only 6.032 3 million (at the end of 2018), the population density is 12.08 people/kmsquare kilometer, so it is a typical sparsely populated province. This means that the urbanization of Qinghai Province needs to find a way suitable for its own special provincial conditions. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the level of urbanization construction in Qinghai Province and analyze the problems existing in the process of urbanization construction in Qinghai Province, so as to formulate a urbanization development strategy suitable for Qinghai. This has obvious practical significance for accelerating the process of urbanization in Qinghai Province, realizing high-quality economic and social development in Qinghai Province, improving the comprehensive strength and regional competitiveness of cities and towns, narrowing the income gap and social inequality between urban and rural areas, and realizing the coordinated development of urban and rural areas.

2 Literature review

Zhang Di

et

al

. constructed a new urbanization index system to evaluate the development level of Xijiang River Basin in Guangxi from four aspects: population, space, economy and coordination. Yu Yu believed that it is necessary to promote the development of a new type of urbanization, and the local characteristics and the emotional sustenance of the people can not be ignored. Through the dual structure and Petty-Clark theorem, Liu Guobin

et

al

. found that although Jilin Province is a major agricultural province, the agricultural output value is low, and the development of new urbanization is relatively backward. The fundamental reason lies in the unreasonable industrial structure, the restriction of dual structure and the influence of location factors. We should adjust the industrial structure, improve the system and develop the new type of urbanization in accordance with local conditions.Wang Wenwen

et

al

. used grey correlation degree to evaluate the development level of new urbanization in Wanjiang demonstration area, and found that the population contributed the most to the development of urbanization, and the development level of provincial capital cities was the highest. Song Haiyun

et

al

. believed that green and low carbon is the foundation of developing new urbanization and establishing ecological civilization, and explored the theory of green development of new urbanization. Liu Zunfeng

et

al

. used factor analysis to evaluate the new county urbanization in Hebei Province, and carried out cluster analysis to put forward development suggestions. Most of these scholars conducted horizontal research, and even there is longitudinal research, the time is short, which can not accurately and objectively reflect which factors have great influence on the urbanization level of a region, with a certain degree of chance.

3 Empirical analysis

3.1 Index design and selection

According to the concept and connotation of urbanization, the index selection follows the three principles of comprehensiveness, scientificity and availability based on the special natural environment and provincial situation of Qinghai Province, in order to objectively and truly reflect the development level of urbanization in Qinghai Province. The index evaluation system of urbanization in Qinghai Province is designed from five aspects: economic development, people’s life, ecological environment, social development and integration of urban and rural areas (Table 1).

Table 1 Evaluation index system of urbanization quality level in Qinghai Province

3.2 Data selection

The data of this paper come from

Qinghai

Statistical

Yearbook

from 1999 to 2017,

Qinghai

Land

Greening

Bulletin

from 2000 to 2006,

Qinghai

National

Economic

and

Social

Development

Statistical

Bulletin

in 2018, official website of National Bureau of Statistics and official website of Qinghai Provincial Bureau of Statistics. Some of the index data are obtained by calculation.

3.3 Research methods

In this paper, the entropy method is used to weight each index to measure and evaluate the development quality of urbanization in Qinghai Province. In order to minimize and avoid the subjective factors and some objective limitations in the process of determining the weight, the entropy method is used to determine the index weight, which has strong credibility. At the same time, the analysis process is hierarchical and step-by-step, which is convenient for research. The calculation steps of entropy method are as follows.

Normalization treatment: there are great differences in the nature and value of various indexes, so it is necessary to normalize each index in order to eliminate the impact of this difference on the evaluation results. At the same time, the indexes have different attributes, so the two indexes need to be calculated separately, and the calculation formula is as follows.

Positive and negative indexes:

(1)

(2)

At the same time, the normalized data is migrated by 1 unit.

The proportion of value of index

j

in year

i

is calculated:

(3)

The entropy of index information is calculated:

(4)

The utility value of information is calculated:

d

=1-

e

(5)

The index weight is calculated:

(6)

The score of evaluation index for year

i

is calculated:

S

=

W

×

X

(7)

The overall score of the urbanization quality level in year

i

is calculated:

(8)

where

X

is the original value of index

j

in year

i

,

X

is the normalized index,

X

maxand

X

minrepresent the maximum and minimum values of index

j

in year

i

, respectively,

m

is the number of years, and

n

is the number of indexes.

From the scores of urbanization level of various dimensions in Qinghai Province from 1999 to 2018 (Table 2), it can be seen that the indexes of different dimensions showed a rising trend from 1999 to 2018.Among them, the indexes of economic development, social development and integration of urban and rural areas were always on the rise, and economic development and social development were at a high level, and the living standards of residents and ecological environment were fluctuating and rising. Although the integration of urban and rural areas was on the rise, the gap between it and other indexes showed a widening trend, which might be caused by the constraints of the natural environment. Qinghai Province has a vast agricultural and pastoral area, and there are a large number of farmers and herdsmen. As a result, the benefits brought by the process of urbanization are difficult to be brought to the broader agricultural and pastoral areas and farmers and herdsmen.

Table 2 Evaluation value of various dimensions and overall levels of Qinghai Province from 1999 to 2018

As can be seen from Fig.1, the level of urbanization in Qinghai Province can be roughly divided into three stages: in the first stage (from 1999 to 2005), the process of urbanization in Qinghai Province was basically in a gentle stage, and the growth rate of comprehensive evaluation was lower than that of urbanization rate, which was due to the fact that only attention was paid to the expansion of "quantity" at that time, while the importance of "quality" was ignored; in the second stage (from 2006 to 2011), the urbanization of Qinghai Province was in the stage of slow growth; in the third stage (from 2012 to 2018), urbanization in Qinghai Province was in the stage of rapid development, which might be the result of the change of the concept of development in Qinghai Province after the 18CPC National Congress put forward a new road of urbanization in 2012. At the same time, it is also found that the trend of economic development and social development is basically the same, and the coordination between them is good, which also shows that in the process of urbanization in Qinghai Province, we should not only pay attention to economic development, but also pay attention to social construction.

Fig.1 Line chart of urbanization rate of Qinghai Province from 1999 to 2018

5 Measures and suggestions

5.1 Strengthening the construction of ecological civilization

The greatest value of Qinghai Province lies in ecology, and the greatest potential also lies in ecology. Qinghai Province should fully integrate the concept of ecological civilization into the whole process of urban development and construction, realize the healthy and sustainable development of urban economy and society without sacrificing the ecological environment, and promote intensive use of land resources, water resources and energy. It is necessary to strengthen ecological restoration and environmental governance, promote the construction of green cities, and promote the formation of green operation and management models and green and low-carbon production and life styles. It is necessary to strengthen the protection of the natural environment, reduce man-made interference to nature as much as possible, reduce the pollution and damage to the ecological environment to a certain extent, and organically combine urban construction with ecological environment protection, to finally form a city with a beautiful ecological environment.

5.2 Balancing urban and rural development

It is necessary to strengthen the overall planning of urban and rural areas, make agriculture and industry benefit each other, emphasize the equal exchange of urban and rural elements and the balanced allocation of public resources, strive to break the current situation of urban and rural "dual economic structure", and abandon the development thinking of "leaning towards the city" and "neglecting the countryside". It is necessary to speed up the implementation of the strategy of revitalizing rural areas and comprehensively develop agriculture and develop special agricultural products such as highland barley wine and yak meat on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in accordance with the general goal of beautiful rural areas, strong agriculture, and rich farmers. It is necessary to improve the quality of agricultural products, extend the agricultural industrial chain, enhance the added value of agricultural products, increase farmers’ income, enhance the ability of industry to promote agriculture and cities to lead rural areas, speed up rural economic and social development, and promote the integrated development of urban and rural areas.

5.3 Focusing on the development of small towns

The special geographical conditions and population of Qinghai Province determine that the urbanization of Qinghai Province should not take the development road of big cities, but focus on the development of small towns. According to the advantages of local eco-environmental carrying capacity and resource endowment, we should rationally develop and utilize resources, to comprehensively enhance the economic strength and population carrying capacity of small towns, and realize the local urbanization of farmers and herdsmen.