Assessing the County's Rural Development Types and Their Rurality：a Case Study of the Three Gorges Eco Economic Region in Chongqing

The eco economic zone of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area in Chongqing is characterized by a large number of rural populations，high proportions of the poor，and a wide range of poverty stricken areas.Assessing the rurality and making the development direction clearer is helpful to promote the balancing urban rural development and new countryside constructions.The data is collected from Chongqing Statistical Yearbook 2010 .The relative proportion of the three industries in the GDP is used to categorize this eco economic zone into four rural development types，and they are agricultural dominated，industrial and mineral dominated，balanced and business，tourism and service oriented.On this basis，the rurality of each country is assessed by the indicators of urbanization，agricultural labor productivity，agricultural output growth，the ratio of agricultural to nonagricultural output，highway density，radio and television coverage.It indicates that significant differences exist between similar and different rural development type.In the mining and industrial oriented countries，there are only three districts which have weak rurality and two counties with significant rurality.And in the balanced counties，there are four counties with middle rurality，and another four counties with significant rurality.However，all the agricultural dominated and business，tourism and service oriented counties are significant.It is thus clear that the ecoeconomic zone of the Three Gorges Reservoir area in Chongqing is featured by high ruralities.In addition，this paper proposes two suggestions for the economy development of the eco economic zone of the Three Gorges Reservoir area：1)to increase governmental investment，strengthen infrastructure constructions and promote orderly urbanization as to successively improve the rural modernization level；and 2) to develop distinctive industries according to local circumstances，acquire wealth relying on their resources elements as to strengthen rural development sustainability.