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Regional Inequality In China: An Overview
China’s spectacular growth and poverty reduction has been accompanied by growing inequality which threatens the social compact and thus the political basis for economic growth and social development. The regional dimension of inequality— rural/urban, inland/coastal and provincial—dominates in a country as large as China, and especially with its particular history. The three of us have been researching Chinese regional inequality for over a decade. In a series of papers which have been published in peer reviewed journals, we have been involved in a systematic investigation into the nature and evolution of regional inequality in China. The object of this volume is to bring together a selection of these papers by us and our co-authors, so that researchers and policy makers can have access to them in one place. This introduction provides an overview of the volume.
Multiscale and multimechanisms of regional inequality in China: implications for regional policy
2002
Research on regional inequality in China has generated controversial ndings. This paper reveals that the trend for the last four and a half decades shows no clear divergent, convergent, or inverted-U patterns. I argue that regional inequality in China is sensitive to geographical scale and in uenced by multiple mechanisms, and that the global and domestic contexts for China's regional development have changed dramatically. In particular, China's triple transitions-decentralization, marketization, and globalization-have fundamentally changed the mechanisms underlying regional development. Changes require new thinking on regional development strategies in China, which should emphasize developing non-state sectors, fully utilizing human resources, enhancing geographical targeting, and reforming urban and regional planning institutions.
Regional Inequality in China: A Case Study of Jiangsu Province
The Professional Geographer, 2000
The tremendous changes in China's development philosophy and regional economies during the last two decades have carved out selectively new locations of development across the nation. While politicians heatedly debate the acceptable levels of regional inequality, most scholarly studies focus on broad aggregate trends of inequality among provinces and groups of provinces, and pay little attention to identifying and conceptualizing sources and major agents of spatial change. This paper aims at revealing detailed spatial ramifications of the reforms, and at understanding the impacts of the state, local agents, and foreign investors on regional development. To this effect, we conduct a disaggregated and empirical study of Jiangsu, a coastal province experiencing dramatic economic and spatial restructuring. We show that local agents which favor rural industrial enterprises accelerated new growth in selected rural areas, in contrast to slower growth of older cities and state-owned enterprises, resulting in a net decline of intercounty inequality. But the coalescence of state policy, local agents, and foreign investment has widened the historical gap between northern and southern Jiangsu, and is likely to accelerate intercounty inequality in the future. Our study demonstrates the utility of the "developments from above, below and outside" framework for analyzing key forces of regional growth in socialist transitional economies.
The spatial-temporal hierarchy of regional inequality of China
Applied Geography, 2010
This paper advances the multi-scale and multi-mechanism framework of regional inequality in China by using the most recent statistical data. We analyze the multi-scalar patterns of China's regional inequality with GIS and statistical techniques, and demonstrate the significance of the municipality effect. The authors also apply multilevel modeling to identify the spatial structure and time dimension of the underlying forces driving regional development. This study illustrates that China's regional inequality is sensitive to the spatial-temporal hierarchy of multi-mechanisms, and reveals the relative influence of globalization, marketization, and decentralization. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. q We'd like to acknowledge the funding of the Ford Foundation (10851022) and the NSF of China (70621001).
Regional Inequality in Transitional China
2020
This book investigates uneven regional development in China-with particular focus on the cases of Guangdong and Zheijiang provinces-which have been at the forefront of debate since Chinese economic reform. Rapid economic growth since the 'opening-up' of China has been accompanied by significant disparities in the regional distribution of income: this book represents one of the most recent studies to present a picture of this inequality. Built upon a multi-scale and multi-mechanism framework, it provides systematic examination of both the patterns and mechanisms of regional development and inequality in provincial China, emphasizing the effects of economic transition. Approaching from a geographical perspective, its authors consider the interplay between the local, the state, and the global forces in shaping the landscape of regional inequality in China. Extensive empirical findings will prove useful to those researching other developing countries within the frontier of globalization and economic transition.
New Perspective on Regional Inequality: Theory and Evidence from Guangdong, China
China's open-door policy and rapid urbanization have been accompanied by an unprecedented economic growth rate and an expanding regional inequality problem. Which factors affect the regional inequality? Will it get worse? What policy measures should be taken to offset these adverse effects? Based on the Lorenz curve and a core-periphery (C-P) setting, this research brings up a theoretical model for the regional inequality, using the Gini coefficient as the indicator with respect to the population concentration and the C-P gradient. In theory, given a fixed C-P gradient, the regional inequality generally shows an inverted-U curve along with the population concentration in the core area. This research maintains that a new perspective, based on the relationship between the C-P gradient and the population shift, should be taken to describe the development trend of regional inequality, because there is not a stable inverted-U shape on a time scale nor is there a constant stage of increase or decrease. The gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the population data from the Pearl River delta, one of the biggest metropolitan areas in China, and its periphery in Guangdong province were sampled to test the theory. Further analysis indicated that a turning point in approximately 2005 did not necessarily mean that Guangdong had passed the phase of expanding regional inequality. Finally, some policy proposals are suggested to mitigate the situation.
China Regional Disparities - The Causes and Impact of Regional Inequalities in Income and Well-Being
2007
Comparison of China’s major regions, detailed below, shows that in official GDP per capita terms and for rural income and consumption, disparities appear large. Furthermore, both over 20 years and over the 2000-05 five-year period, Chinese rural income and consumption disparities have increased, as measured by the ratios of per-capita rural household statistics representative for major regions. In other words, regional rural household income and consumption levels in China are diverging (at least through 2005) and have been, whether measured since 1985 or 2000. Although disparities are growing, the extraordinarily rapid improvement in rural household income and consumption levels in all regions over both longer-term (1985-2005) and more recent (2000-2005) periods is notable. Average annual real growth in rural household income was at least 6.0 percent for all seven regions over the period 1985-2005, and for consumption the corresponding average growth rate was at least 6.5 percent o...
Review of Development Economics, 2005
The paper constructs and analyzes a long-run time series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, and finally the period of openness and global integration in the late 1990s. Econometric analysis establishes that regional inequality is explained in the different phases by three key policy variables-the ratio of heavy industry to gross output value, the degree of decentralization, and the degree of openness.
Beyond convergence: space, scale, and regional inequality in China
2009
Since the late 1980s there has been a renewed interest in regional inequality, fuelled by the concern over the effects of globalisation and liberalisation, and facilitated by theoretical and methodological developments in geography and economics. In essence, the new convergence theory, like the old convergence theory, is another theory devoid of space and time. Research on China has unfolded a complex landscape of regional development, the existence of distinct models of regional development, and the significant role of institutions. This paper examines regional inequality in China, especially Zhejiang Province, and attempts to uncover the trend and driving forces of regional inequality. It adopts a top-down and bottom-up strategy and employs recent developments in exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and geographically weighted regression (GWR). We have found that regional inequality is sensitive to geographic scales and spatial organisation, and that conventional approaches mask spatial agglomeration and the significance of regions in shaping trends of regional inequality. Overall, regional inequality in Zhejiang rose during the reform period and a division between coastal and interior Zhejiang formed, additionally sustained by weak linkages between the two regions and the significance of location and nonstate enterprises in development. This paper further reveals the emergence of Wenzhou, and discusses its effect on regional inequality.