Non-agricultural Population, Employment and Land： An Econometric Study in an Integrated Framework

Abstract This paper explored the relationships among nonagricultural population, employment and land in an integrated framework, taking account of rural-urban land conversion into Carlino–Mills’s model on the regional growth. Two-stage-leastsquares and ordinary-least-squares were employed. Recent data for district (grade) cities in China (from 1999 to 2005) were used. Our results showed that: first, urban population influenced non-agricultural employment, and vice versa, but the evidence that non-agricultural employment influenced urban population was stronger than the evidence that urban population influenced non-agricultural employment; second, urban population and non-agricultural employment both influenced ruralurban land conversion, but the evidence that urban population influenced rural urban land conversion was more stronger than the evidence that non-agricultural employment did. We also found that: first, the employment from the secondary industry influenced urban population in a positive way, and...