Uncovering the urban-rural integration of China over the past 40 years: Measurement framework and spatial-temporal evolution

Alleviating the imbalance between urban and rural areas for regional coordinated development is an imperative response to the Sustainable Development Goal 10 of the United Nations. To track China’s urban-rural integration (URI) progress and address the uneven issues in specific fields, this study constructed a novel seven-dimension index system of URI, comprising free population mobility (FPM), efficient land transfer (ELT), interactive economic growth (IEG), highly-linked transportation (HLT), equal public services (EPS), joint environmental governance (JEG) and unimpeded informatization (UIM) between urban and rural areas. Based on a comprehensive measurement framework and multi-source panel data, we uncovered the spatial-temporal evolution of URI in China’s 367 prefecture-level administrative units from 1980 to 2022. The results demonstrated that China’s URI steadily increased from 27.51 to 57.35 with an average annual growth rate of 3.40%. Whereas, the overall URI was relatively inferior in 2022, at the level of moderate integration whose proportion of China’s land area was 88.08%. The URI level in eastern region and urban agglomerations was higher than that in mid-west and non-urban agglomerations. From the perspective of 7 dimensions, IEG, JEG and UIM made an obvious improvement and reached higher integration, while FPM, ELT, HLT and EPS maintained the stage of moderate integration in 2022. In the future, China should make targeted efforts for URI in terms of population, land use, transportation and public services, and accelerate urban-rural common prosperity in the mid-west and economically underdeveloped areas.