Non-agricultural Population, Employment and Land: An Econometric Study in an Integrated Framework

There are close relationship between non-agricultural population, employment and land, the core of urbanization. Most researches so far have neglected those relationships and failed to analyze them in in integrated framework. We establish such a framework taking account rural urban land conversion into Carlino-Mills's model on regional growth, employ two-stage-least-square and ordinary-least-square to estimate the relationship and test the model using recent data for district (grade) cities in China(from 1999 and 2005). Our results show that(1)urban Population is affected by nonagricultural employment and nonagricultural employment is affected by urban population and both are positive and significant. but the impacts of the former to the latter is larger than that oil the latter to the former: Our further study show that urban population are closely related to the secondary industry employment. and this is positive, while the relationship between urban population and the third industry employment is negative.(2)rural urban land conversion is affected by urban population and nonagricultural employment, and it is positive and significant but the impacts of urban population to rural urban land conversion is larger than that on the nonagricultural employment to rural urban land conversion. Rural urban land conversion is affected by the secondary industry employment and it is positive. but the interaction between rural urban land conversion and the third industry employment is negative(3)rural urban land conversion will slow down in urban with high density of non-agricultural employment: while rural urban land conversion will exacerbate in urban with high density of urban population..