Spatial analysis on regional economic growth of China

1. Introduction Economic growth is always an important topic in the economics research. Many study in the past just considered region as an isolated “island”, and the mutual relations among different regions were usually ignored. However, regional economy is an open system. Factors such as trade, factor mobility (labor or capital), and technology or knowledge spillover will all make relations among regions become complicated. Under such circumstance, regional economy is no longer isolated but strongly related. The development of regional economy not only relies on its own endowment, also highly depends on the development of other regions This paper is going to bring relative spatial autocorrelation analysis and econometrics methods in the analysis of regional economic growth in China. It attempts to test the spatial dependence of economic growth among different provinces in China and its tendency. The inner mechanism of regional economic growth will also be discussed. In the second section, I will briefly introduce the literature review about regional economic study in China. In the third section, using a sample of per capita GDP data over 1978-2008 in 31 provinces in mainland China, I compute a global spatial autocorrelation, and use the local spatial autocorrelation to get general idea where this global spatial autocorrelation come from. In the fourth part, the spatial factors which influence regional economic growth will be tested. Conclusion will be included in the last section.

2. Literature review In China, the study of regional economic growth has attracted many attentions, but the study on regional correlation and disparity is usually made using traditional non-spatial analysis such as variation coefficient, Gini coefficient and so on (Xu et al,2005). However, at the regional scale,