城市化是人类社会活动及生产要素从农村地区向城市地区转移的过程。其结果,现代城市最终成为了人类社会的生活、生产、消费和污染集聚之地。因此,人口和经济的集聚状态成为衡量现代城市化的两项基本指标。包括中国在内的12个国家实证分析表明,无论是发达国家还是发展中国家,经济城市化的发展水平往往快于人口城市化的发展水平。更为重要的是,第二产业发展在国家人口城市化进程中的作用存在着由强变弱的趋势;与此同时,第三产业发展对人口城市化发育的影响则要强烈得多。相比之下,中国人口与经济城市化差异过大,导致这种情况出现的一个主要原因是城市产业结构发育的长期失衡。
Urbanization can be referred to as a process by which both human activities and productive factors concentrated from rural areas urban areas. As a result, modern cities act as the central piaces for human-being,not only in settlements and material consumptions, but also in social productions and environmental pollutions. Therefore, the changing patterns of agglomeration both in demography(which can be named as the demographic-urbanization)and in economy(which can be titled as the economic-urbanization)should be the two essential criteria for measuring national or regional urbanization, rather than the only one in demography. The findings, based upon the modern urbanization movement of 12 countries, including China, are salutary. First, development speed of economic-urbanization in all the countries is faster than that of demographic-urbanization. Second, but more important,as the role of secondary industry in modern urbanization process is going to be weakened, the influences of tertiary industry on modern urbanization is getting greater and greater. By contrary, the structural change oriented to the development of the secondary industry rather than that of the tertiary could be the major reason for a widening gap between economic- and demographic-urbanization in China.