工商管理学外文翻译 外文文献 英文文献 中国快速的城镇化所引起的不良反应.docVIP

The Health Penalty of China’s Rapid Rapid urbanization could have positive and negative health effects, such that the net impact on population health is not obvious. It is, however, highly pertinent to the human welfare consequences of development. This paper uses community and individual level longitudinal data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey to estimate the net health impact of China’s unprecedented urbanization. We construct an index of urban city from a broad set of community characteristics and define urbanization in terms of movements across the distribution of this index. We use difference-in-differences estimators to identify the treatment effect of urbanization on the self-assessed health of individuals. The results reveal important, and robust, negative causal effects of urbanization on health. Urbanization increases the probability of reporting fair or poor health by 5 to 15 percentage points, with a greater degree of urbanization having larger health effects. While people in more urbanized areas are, on average, in better health than their rural counterparts, the process of urbanization is damaging to health. Our measure of self-assessed health is highly correlated with subsequent mortality and the causal harmful effect of urbanization on health is confirmed using more objective (but also more specific) health indicators, such as physical impairments, disease symptoms and hypertension. Urbanization and economic development are intimately related (Williamson, 1988). There is no better example of this than China in recent decades, where a remarkable rate of economic growth has been accompanied by a process of urbanization that is unprecedented in human history, both in scale and in speed. The proportion of the Chinese population living in urban areas increased from only 20% in 1980, to 27% in 1990, and reached 43% in 2005 (NBS, 2006; World Bank 2006). By the middle of this century, the countrys urbanization rate has been forecast to rea