twentieth century urbanization in bangladesh and a spell of high and unsustainable urban growth

Bangladesh is s till a low urbanized country although it experienced a rising trend in the level of urbanization throughout the twentieth century and had a remarkably high urban growth immediately after its independence in 1971. the country recorded the highes t ever annual average growth rate (9.04) and percentage of interval variation (137.57%) in an urban population in 1974; thereafter, growth rates of these two parameters went on falling and reached 5.19 and 65.89% respectively in 1991. as a result, urbanization during the tail end of the twentieth century increased but at a decreasing rate leading to an unsus tainable urban growth trend. this s tudy, however, examines the factors that contributed to urbanizing bangladesh during the unsus tainable growth period particularly in the las t decades of the twentieth century. to this end, a multivariate regression model is developed and analyzed using the ordinary leas t square method involving s tepwise-regression procedure. primarily ten potential factors are taken into consideration and seven of them emerged as significant in explaining the process of urbanization in bangladesh. of these seven factors, the level of indus trialization appears as the mos t influential factor with a coefficient of 1.34, which is followed by the share of urban area, initial level of urbanization and migration with coefficients of 1.13, 0.86 and 0.49 respectively; while the econometric model came up with an adjus ted r2 of 0.95 and the durbin-watson s tatis tic of 1.98. results of this s tudy provide with better unders tanding towards guiding the urbanization process, particularly in the developing countries.