Change of Chinese cities to power spending growth

A new chapter is opening in China's development. The country is starting to turn the corner to becoming an economy where private consumption will replace investment as the major driver of gross domestic product growth. Our projections suggest that the acceleration of growth in private consumption will result in it becoming the largest contributor to GDP growth by 2020. By around 2025, private consumption will overtake investment as the largest share in GDP overall.

Nowhere are these broad trends in China's economy likely to manifest themselves more dramatically than in its cities. The urban landscape thus provides a lens to see how these dynamics and changes could play out.

First, while China will see continuing urbanization over the next two decades, the urban labor pool will stop growing by the end of the period. This is due to the aging of the population: from 2012 to 2030, the 0-to-14-year-old population cohort will see a decline of 1.2 percent per year, while the over-65 cohort will grow at 3.9 percent per year. Thus there will be fewer people available for the future labor force, and the likely result is that the nonworking population will account for a larger share of the total.

While migration will continue on a large scale, it will be at a slower rate compared with previous years. In the next decade, with the change in the population's age profile, there is likely to be a reduced supply of working-age rural migrants available to move to cities.

Large-scale migration is especially likely to decline to the southern coastal cities, which have traditionally been home to export-oriented industries. Instead, rural workers in inland provinces are now more likely to want to work in cities close to their hometown.

One reason is that workers in the emerging manufacturing bases of Henan, Hubei, and Sichuan provinces are seeing incomes grow more rapidly than in the past.

In addition, as total employment opportunities expand in inland cities, rural inhabitants in these regions may prefer to stay close to home, retaining the residence privileges of living in their rural home areas but working in urban areas.

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