Figure 1.
Global patterns of changes in urbanization, 1980–2011.
(a) shows the global pattern of urbanization level in 1980, and (b) that observed in 2011. The urbanization level (0–100%) has been divided into ten categories, in blocks of 10%. Each category is denoted by a different color. World urbanization demonstrated remarkable growth in both developed countries and developing countries during 1980–2011, especially in China, Southeast Asia, and Africa.
Figure 2.
The distributions of total population and GDP per capita by urbanization level.
Applying similar population pyramid methods, the structure of total population and GDP per capita are detailed and compared between 1980 and 2011. The blue represents 1980 and the red represents 2011. (a) shows the total population, and (b) shows GDP per capita.
Table 1.
Urbanization level and GDP per capita of the 60–70% and 70–80% groups, 1980.
Figure 3.
Urbanization speed and economic growth rate, 1980–2011.
(a) shows the global pattern of speed of urbanization, and (b) shows the economic growth rate during 1980–2011. Both the speed of urbanization (0–1.5%) and the economic growth rate (0–11%) have been divided into five categories, according to the respective annual increase. Each category is denoted by a different color.
Table 2.
Classification of development speed, 1980–2011.
Figure 4.
Scatter plots of level and speed of urbanization and economic growth.
This figure corresponds to the scatter plot of model , for level in 1980 and 2011, and for speed during 1980–2011. (a) and (b) show the correlation between urbanization level and GDP per capita in 1980 and 2011, respectively. (c) shows the correlation between speed of urbanization and economic growth rate during 1980–2011. Please note the marked correlation difference between level and speed of urbanization and economic growth in the world.
Table 3.
The regression results explaining differences between level and speed.
Figure 5.
Typical countries demonstrating no significant correlation between speed of urbanization and economic performance.
Plotting the annual economic growth rate on the X-axis and speed of urbanization on the Y-axis, different countries form a set of scatter points on a quadrant map. (a) shows the countries with high urbanization speed and low economic performance, and (b) shows the countries with low urbanization speed and high economic performance. Names of countries are abbreviated to three-digit letters according to the ISO criterion. The full names of the countries are seen in Appendix S3. The results highlight the fact that speed of urbanization has no significant correlation with the economic growth rate of observed common phenomena throughout the world.
Table 4.
The panel regression results of level data.
Table 5.
The panel regression results of speed data.