Quality Measurement and Regional Difference of Urbanization in Shandong Province Based on the Entropy Method

Since China's reform and opening up, with the rapid development of urban and rural economy, China has accelerated urbanization process. By the end of 2011, urban population accounts for 51.27% of total population in China. China has already got to a stage of urban society. Due to the low quality of fast growing urbanization, along with promoting the income growth of peasants, promoting the rural transformation and buffering the conflict between human and land in countryside, the extensive pattern of development also carries a series of negative influences to the healthy and sustainable development of city and countryside. It has been the priority task of China's urbanization to transform the pattern and improve the quality of urbanization development. Especially on the eastern costal region which has developed economy and higher level of land urbanization, it is of more considerable realistic significance to promote the process of transformation from only pursuing speed to aiming at improving the quality, and from partial urbanization to comprehensive urbanization. Based on specifying the connotation of urbanization quality, the thesis elaborates a quality evaluation index system adapting to urbanization of Shandong Province, with considering 6 aspects, namely the economic growth, the social progress, the demographic development, the ecological environment, the urban-rural harmony, and the urbanization effectiveness. It also employs an entropy method to comprehensively measure the urbanization quality of Shandong Province. According to overall scores, the 17 cities are classified into five categories: 1) high quality urbanization regions; 2) relatively high quality urbanization regions; 3) medium quality urbanization regions; 4) relatively low quality urbanization regions; and 5) low quality urbanization regions. By summarizing the similarities of all these categories, the thesis analyses the existing problems and inadequacies of urbanization of each city in detail and discusses their future developments.