Study on Strategies for Coordinating Land-use Urbanization and Population Urbanization in Shandong Province

Population urbanization is the terminal target for the development of urbanization, and land-use urbanization is the main approach for pushing the development of urbanization, which are supposed to be closely associated and combined organically. By calculating the elasticity coefficient of urban land expansion, this paper finds that generally the land-use urbanization in Shandong Province is much faster than the population urbanization during the period from 2006 to 2015; from the regional perspective, the land-use urbanization is much faster than the population urbanization in the peninsular area, northwest, and southwest of Shandong, while in the middle area of Shandong, the situation is opposite. The imbalance is mainly embodied in the high pace of the land-use urbanization and low pace of the population urbanization, and it relies on the following reasons. On one hand, the fiscal incentives of urbanization financing, the dependence on land finance for urbanization and encouragement of urbanization investment are the impact factors for the high pace of land-urbanization. On the other hand, reasons for the relatively low pace of population urbanization include that the growth of urban population may put additional burdens on the local fiscal expenditure, and the urban-rural division of household registration systems acts as a barrier for the population urbanization. Furthermore, a considerable amount of rural populations are unwilling to move to urban areas, due to some individual or household level reasons. In order to coordinate population urbanization and land-use urbanization in Shandong Province, it is essential to guarantee the migration freedom of rural population in cities, protect their benefits regarding to land ownership, set up funds to help them adapt to urban lives, and enhance the supply levels of public service.