CHINA BRACED FOR RISING TIDE OF URBAN MIGRANTS
Source: By Geoff Dyer in Shanghai Date: 2008-03-24
More than 40 per cent of the population of Chinese cities will be made up of migrants within two decades, putting huge pressure on the ability of local governments to provide services to citizens, according to a study by the McKinsey Global Institute.
On top of the existing 103m urban migrants, Chinese cities will face an influx of another 243m migrants by 2025, taking the urban population up to nearly 1bn people. In the medium and large cities, about half the population will be migrants, which is almost three times the current level.
The forecasts, contained in a study on urbanisation in China, underline the enormous challenge facing Beijing if it is to meet pledges to include the vast army of migrant workers in urban social welfare programmes, to which they are mostly denied access at the moment.
“The fact that 40 to 50 per cent of cities could be made up by migrant workers is a real wake-up call,” said Jonathan Woetzel, a director of McKinsey's Shanghai office and one of the authors of the report.
“Smaller cities in particular are going to face a growing challenge if they are to provide equal access to social services.”
The authors argue that to tackle these mounting pressures, China should move away from its model of more dispersed urbanisation, which is creating hundreds of medium-sized cities and is leading to marked urban sprawl, to a more concentrated model based on fewer, larger cities.
Under that more concentrated model of urbanisation, the report forecasts that GDP per capita could be 20 per cent higher by 2025, as larger cities tend to achieve higher productivity, and energy use would be 20 per cent more efficient. It would also reduce the amount of arable land being taken over by cities.
However, the disadvantages of encouraging larger cities would be more severe air pollution and also greater traffic congestion on China's busy roads.
The government could influence the pattern of urbanisation through land-sale policies, infrastructure investment and the incentives offered to local government officials.
