Читать книгу The Emerging Markets Handbook - Pran Tiku - Страница 100

The current rate of urbanisation is in the range 45% to 51%, which is far from saturation compared to other developed countries. According to Reuters, China plans to spend $6.4 trillion over the next decade to bring 400 million people into cities. The government hopes that 60% of the population of almost 1.4 billion will be urban residents by 2020 and it plans to build homes, roads, hospitals and schools for them. Urbanisation is a policy priority for the Chinese government, as it wants to unlock the next level of growth through domestic demand.

A report on China and its urbanisation by MGI Global research states that in 2002, 40% of China’s relatively small urban middle class lived in the four tier-one cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. By 2022, the share of those megacities will probably fall to about 16% . They will not be shrinking; rather, middle-class growth rates will be far greater in the smaller cities of the north and west. Many are classified as tier-three cities, whose share of China’s upper-middle-class households should reach more than 30% by 2022, up from 15% in 2002. As shown in Exhibit 6, China’s urbanisation is still relatively low. India is the only BRIC country that has a lower level of urbanisation.