## 1 Introduction  
In the 21 st century, the world is accelerating globalization and urbanization; thus, planning plays an irreplaceable role in the macro development of cities and society [1], especially in sustainable development [2, 3]. With the help of new technologies, new concepttions of cities, smart cities, for example, are flourishing to better fulfill the goal of sustainable development [4]. From the perspective of the features and philosophy of urban planning, the origin of planning is to deal with the increasingly serious problems of urbanization, and it had a strong problem-solving origin, that is, to solve the problems of cities during urbanization. Planning research is important in turning theories and research of planning into applications in urban practices [5], and planning research and urban practices could be correlated [6]. From a macro point of view, planning and its related systems were first originated in the countries where urbanization and industrialization first occurred and reached a high level. With the deepening of urbanization, problem-solving-oriented planning is gradually endowed with greater social responsibilities [7; 8]. For instance, Habitat III, the UN summit on human settlements, New Urban Agenda, or SDGs, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, elevated planning as an important means to promote urbanization and social sustainable development [9].  
However, the current understanding of the importance of planning and its research in the world is limited despite the fact that planning is recognized by international communities in sustainable development. Although many experiences proved planning and its research is very important, could in some extent help stimulate economy, and can fulfill the sustainable development, the solid evidence of the importance of planning and its research is limited. Thus, the research problem in this study is based on the following questions: Is planning research important or not? How important is planning research in the macro development process? After searching the literature, we found that research papers were focused on the correlation between innovation and economic development [10; 11], between the development of ICT clusters and economic development, between urbanization process and economic growth [12], between financial investment and planning processes in city and regional planning [11; 13], and contributing to sustainability [14], etc., mainly in economic field [15; 16; 17]. In terms of planning-related research, however, there is no research on the interaction between planning research and macro national development to support the importance of planning or its research [18], and there is no quantitative research based on data to confirm the importance of planning for national macro development and urbanization development [19; 20]. The research gap is very clear; there is no solid and quantitative evidence supporting the importance of planning and its research, despite the fact that its importance is commonly recognized. The specific hypotheses are proposed by authors that planning research and social macro development is closely correlated, which to a large extent means that better planning research leads to better social macro development. Therefore, through quantitative analysis of data, this study attempts to fill this gap, testing whether planning and its research has a correlation with national macro economy, finding implicit links between planning research and urbanization, and economic and social development. This research provides us a new thought in different perspectives and may enhance our understanding of the significance of planning research in macro development based on quantitative statistics. Therefore, it is suggested that countries should increase their investment in planning research at the appropriate time, in order to maximize the role of planning in promoting sustainable urbanization and sustainable development.