Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

China’s urbanization is unprecedented in human history and the National New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020) clearly features a new era of development. Under such circumstance, we developed a policy-driven quasi-experimental household survey that takes advantage of the implementation of the 2014 National New Urbanization Comprehensive Pilot Program, and assessed the impact of the process of urbanization on the well-being of both rural-to-urban migrants and in-situ urbanized rural residents. The survey targets residents of newly urbanized areas in 32 township-level administrative units under county-level cities and urban districts and 8 township-level administrative units that were considered potential sites of urbanization. Half are drawn from the ‘treatment’ group in the Pilot Program. The control group consists of 20 cases that are chosen using the Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) technique.

We are particularly focusing on the health status and socio-psychological well-being of residents residing in both currently urbanizing places and potential sites of urbanization. Our preliminary analysis indicates that respondents residing in urbanizing locales report better general health status, perceive higher social standing and life satisfaction, and consider self-identity more urban but less local than those residing in potential urbanizing places. The design of the survey is bound to yield productive insights into Chinese urbanization, and make a valuable contribution to current debates over the design and impact of urbanization and the inclusive and sustainable development of cities.