Does Population Mobility Contribute to Urbanization Convergence? Empirical Evidence from Three Major Urban Agglomerations in China

Population mobility accelerates urbanization convergence and mitigates the negative impact of the spatial agglomeration effect on urbanization convergence, which is the most important conclusion in this paper. Taking 38 cities in China’s three urban agglomerations (the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region) from 2005 to 2016 as research subjects, the study first shows that there is a large gap in the level of urbanization between the three major urban agglomerations, but the gap has been constantly narrowed and presents a trend of absolute convergence and conditional convergence. Furthermore, without adding a population mobility variable, the combination of the diffusion effect of high-urbanization cities and the high growth rate of low-urbanization cities causes the inter-regional urbanization level to be continuously convergent in the Yangtze River Delta region; however, the combination of the agglomeration effect of high-urbanization cities and the high growth rate of low-urbanization cities causes the inter-regional urbanization to be divergent in the Pearl River Delta and the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region. Under the influence of population mobility, the “catch-up” effect in low-urbanization regions is greater than the agglomeration effect in high-urbanization regions, which promotes the continuous convergence of inter-regional urbanization.