Why the same economic reform leads to different urbanization route? --The comparative study of China and India

China and India are countries that have achieved rapid development on the back of radical national economic reforms. The reforms in these two countries, however, conducted in substantially different ways, which raises the question of which path might be best emulated by other developing countries. Leaving the traditional arguments about economic systems and institutions aside, this study rather highlights the impact of economic reforms on the development of urban systems in China and India. We find the impacts of China’s and India’s reforms to be starkly opposite: whilst acquired advantages from spatial structure of economic system replaces initial benefit from sites as main drivers of urban development in China, in India the impact of acquired advantages is suppressed and initial benefit enhanced. That led to two different pictures of urbanization in countries: some booming city clusters in China while several prosperous but isolated big cities in India. Further, we show that (1) how industrial development strategies, in the market condition, contribute to different paths of urbanization and development of urban system; and (2) why industrial development strategies that seemed reasonable from the view of developing the economic system could be unwise especially for countries with large populations in Asia.