Analysis of urban competitiveness and migration

Abstract

In the globalizing world, cities compete with each other to attract more talents and favorable resources. This research used a sustainable perspective to measure urban competitiveness in economic, social, environmental and external connectivity dimensions in the 25 cities in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and Pearl River Delta (PRD) regions in China. Generally, cities in YRD performed much better than cities in PRD. The 25 cities in PRD and YRD regions had 108.33 million usual residents in 2010. The share of temporary population in the usual residents was 39.6 percent in YRD cities and 59.1 percent in PRD cities respectively. PRD cities received much more inter-provincial and intra-provincial migrants. This chapter finds that migration has a positive impact on urban competitiveness. But different from foreign countries, the inter-provincial migrants include more rural migrants and thus have lower education levels than the inter-provincial migrants over a shorter distance in China. This can be explained by the large regional disparity between provinces and the effect of the hukou system in China. The inter-provincial income gap is much smaller among urban residents than among rural residents. Thus rural residents have more propensity to migrate long distances to seek economic opportunities.