Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Cost of urbanizing

Twelve months ago on this blog (June 24-27, 2013) the topic was China's urbanization goal:  to move 250 million people off rural land into cities, going from 53.7% to 60% of their population by 2020.

They have a more complete plan now, and they've figured out how much it's going to cost.  Using land sales or debt to finance the massive plan, the price tag will amount to about 42 trillion yuan or $6.8 trillion dollars.

The rate of urbanization has slowed and is having a braking effect on economic expansion.  Growing the economy was the central motivation for uprooting hundreds of millions of people.

I can’t think of any country except North Korea that basically tells people where they can live,” said Yukon Huang, a former World Bank country head for China

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