Evaluation of small town development and strategies in county level:Huaiyuan County, Anhui Province as an example

Abstract

Development of small towns is the key to China’s urbanization and the increase of farmers’ income. During the past several years the developments of small towns have made great progress in China and lots of researches have quickened their pace of research on the development of small towns.But we should acknowledge that in the process of small town development lots of problems have appeared and needed to be solved successfully for sustainable development, such as how to get harmonious economic and environmental development, how to balance the disparity between rich and poor, etc. So the researchers should pay more attention to the development of small towns and put forward more feasible suggestions to facilitate the development. This paper tries to analyze the development of small towns by using theories and measures different from conventional by taking Huaiyuan County, Anhui Province as an example. Firstly it acknowledges the Huaiyuan County has made rapid progress in small town development in the past several years. Then it points out the problems related to the development, including the unreasonable planning and allocation, insufficiency of construction fund, the lag of basic infrastructure and lack of talented personnel and so on. In order to get more legible judgment the authors analyze the developing level of Huaiyuan County by using quantitative method. The author takes the density of roads in towns, the level of labor forces’ income and other factors as the evaluating index. The result indicates that Huaiyuan County is undergoing the transition period from the prophase to the metaphase of the small town development. Considering the situation and problems in Huaiyuan's development, the author identifies several strategies to ameliorate its development. Firstly, to pay more attention to the construction of epicenter towns. Taking the quantity of exporting commodities, the increase of investment from outside and other ten factors as index, the authors filtrate out Chenji, Zhutuan, Dongmiao, Xiaoyi, Boji and Gucheng towns as the centric towns. All the towns have great potential and influence to the surrounding towns. The local government should pay more attention and provide funds to these towns to make them develop more efficiently and speedy in the future. Furthermore, the authors put forward some suggestions to accelerate the development of Huaiyuan County. They are: to collect funds from multiple channels; to protect the environment and pay more attention to the sustainable development; and to consummate the market system.