A Comprehensive Study On The Regional Discrepancies In China's Economic Development

This paper deals with the regional discrepancies in China's economic development. It consists of six chapters. Chapter One examines briefly the present situation of China's imbalanced economic development in different areas. Having studied a few popular academic views, the author offers his own opinion as about how to evaluate and measure the economic imbalance in a neat and effective way among China's different regions. Through careful considerations, the author points out that it is all objective and reliable to adopt GDP per capita as a simple and effective index in evaluating the economic imbalance among different regions in this country, and to adopt the coefficient of variation, the Theil entropy measurement, and the Gini coefficient as the comprehensive statistics in measuring the relative economic imbalance herewith. With the application of the statistical methods introduced in the previous chapter, Chapter Two presents a panorama of the history of the imbalanced economic development in China's different parts for the purpose of making the reader have a true picture of the topic. The last section of Chapter Two gives a sum-up. It is interesting to note that the imbalanced economic situation among China's eastern and the mid-western regions is still enlarging, and this discrepancy took place before 1978 in which China began her great economic reform. At present, this discrepancy amounts to more than 50% of the total difference in term s of economic development level among China's different provinces and municipal metropolitans directly controlled by the central government. As for the discrepancies among provinces and municipal cities directly controlled by the central government, although it became a bit more negative in 1990s, it took an up-set down U shape since 1949,with the ending years of 1970s as the turning point. This is to say, this discrepancy has been diminishing since 1978 on the whole.(Please see other discrepancies in the paper in detail.) Chapter Three analyzes both the shaping and developing of our country's regional differences, and this kind of analysis is very helpful in evaluating the economic gains and losses with reference to policies adopted since 1949. It is also beneficial to the attempt to investigate the socio-economic gains and losses as such. What is more, such an analysis will help us make better policies toward regional economic development. The following aspects are examined in detail, they are ---the different regional economic basis, the policy effect induced by the central government funding, the industrial framework, the degree of market maturity, the economic efficiency, population and the growth rate. Chapter Four makes a prediction of the future movement of the regional discrepancies. With reference to our on-going economic reform, the prediction should be set in the background that the degree of our socialist market system would become higher, therefore, in this chapter, the author begins his study through investigating the western scholars?theories and methods, both normative and positive, about the regional economic discrepancy, and its long-term prediction. Then the author makes a tentative analysis of the somewhat similar situation in China with the government role and market mechanism as the focus. It is addressed clearly in this paper that on the one hand, the allocation of the scarce economic resources among the different parts of China would become more efficient with the maturation of our market system, and t...