Agent based simulation of China's urban demographics: Impacts on the real estate market.

摘要

Demographic in China is a very interesting research topic; researchers have conducted substantial work in this area. On the other hand, most previous works have two common short comings. First, most researchers applied probability distribution and statistical techniques toward projecting future China's demographics, as well as its impacts on the Chinese real estate market; while for a complex system like the demographic; an agent based simulation approach might be more thorough and realistic. The second issue regarding previous research works is that most researchers take the projection of nationwide population as their main research outcome, while this thesis concentrates only on China's urban demographics. The reason being that rural population contributes little to the modern, export oriented economy, as a consequence, results generated from this simulation has more impact on the Chinese economy.;Agent based simulation and modeling is a computationally demanding technique, having its origins in discrete event simulation, genetic algorithms and cellular automata. It's a powerful technique for simulating dynamic, complex systems and observing "emergent" behavior. Since there can be a lot of randomness associated with simulations, it is a great tool for the simulation of demographic change.;Anticipated results for this agent based simulation is to project China's urban demographics from 2011 to 2025, specifically the amount of potential consumers in the housing market. What is more, housing starts, which is the number of privately owned new houses (technically housing units) on which construction has been started in a given period; mostly apartment buildings in China; will be another intended simulation result. One thing differ from regular housing starts index is that the simulation will generate housing starts that meet the demand, which is the number of houses sold, instead of the number of houses built.;The housing market is impacted heavily by demographic changes. Additionally, real-estate development consumes more than 50% of commodities in China including copper, cement, steel and more. Since the worldwide demand of these commodities are mostly driven by China, especially copper; a change in the Chinese housing market will have a significant impact on the demand for these commodities and world commodity prices.;The result for this thesis implies that the urban demographics will keep increase in a much lower rate from 2010 to 2016, and starts to decrease from there. Meanwhile, simulation outputs were used to train regression models in order to forecast the future trends of housing market related economic indicators, such as housing starts. Which show that the housing market related economic indicators will also suer a major decrease after the year of 2016. The definition of these economic indicators and outputs will be presented in detail in this writing.