Impact Of Geographic Factors On Economic Growth With Spatial Econometrics Method

Economic growth has been a hot issue. Based on the economic growth of three facts: economic diversity, economic convergence, and industry specialization and agglomeration, the paper analyzes the effect of three major geographic factors on these facts.The first chapter is the overviews about these facts and theories of human-land relationship, comparative advantages, and the new theory of economic growth. Based on the two nature theory of Krugman(1993), the paper proposes three geographic factors of the economic growth: the first geographic factor refers to natural environment, including elevation, slope, undulating topography, human climate index, water resource index, and potential agricultural production; the second geographic factor is traffic and location, which are represented by transport facilitation and economic position respectively; the third geography factors is human capital and R&D level , respectively represented by education years and the level of the patent number.Chapter II is about by means of acquiring the values of geographic factors of various regions through modeling.Chapter III develops analysis of the temporal and spatial changes of economic growth. Economic indicators include economic growth rate, economic structure, economic scale and economic efficiency. The paper analyzes regional economic inequality and polarization by calculating the Gini coefficient, Wolfson index and kernel density curve.Chapter IV presents effects of the three major geographic factors on economic diversity , and concludes that the three geographic factors serve as three inducements of economic development, during which the first geographic factor is basal and elementary, the convenient transportation and economic location can promote the geographic environment and bring the second change of the economic development, new economic growth theory indicates the role of human capital and R&D level, whose function is as endogenous impetus in the process of economic development.Based on the cross section data, the paper analyzes the relationship between the geographic factor and economic development, and indicates that the factor influencing the economic development is not single but diverse. On different geographic scale the impacts of geographic factors are different.In seven regions we found three geographic factors having the good relationship between economic developments.(i) In the Northwest and the Southwest, Central District, the relatively poor region, geographic environment can restrict human activity, but the second geographic factors, transportation and economic position can improve the role of first geographic factors, on the whole the people have a limiting effect.(ii) In the relatively economic region, such as Beijing-Tianjin - Hebei-Shandong region, and the eastern coastal areas, the southern coastal areas, we found a good natural environment for agricultural production can provided favorable conditions, and guide the economic development, although with the traffic and human capital development, the effect of the natural environment is reduced ,which still exist, economic development mainly dependent on the second and third geographic factors.In Chapter V which mainly discussed the convergence of regional economy and the analysis of geographic factors, we partitioned the different period, analyzing convergence principle of different economy and the impact of geographic factors on economy convergence, and calculating the steady-state value of economic growth. We can achieve the following results:(i) From 1994 to 2000, there is no σ convergence phenomenon except in southwest region, neither the whole country. However, in different studying period we will get the different σ convergence result.(ii) Comparing the economy convergence regression models considering or not considering the spatial effect, we have recognized that from 1994 to 2004 convergence rate of the northwest and southwest region among Seven regions speed up, and Eastern coastal region, Beijing-Tianjin - Hebei-Shandong region and the central region economy showing the divergence of economy with increasing tendency, namely the mutual geographic effect can increase the disparity among different regions.(iii) In order to explore the function principle of the geography factor on economic convergence, on regional scale from 1999 to 2004, we analyze the impact of geographic factors on the rate of economic growth, finding that in the seven regions, the impact of the first main factor of the first geographic factor on economic growth is positive, namely economic growth in such regions that have the good condition about landform will be better. The impact of the second main factor on economic growth in developed regions like the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei-Shandong region, the Eastern coastal region and Southern coastal region is positive, that is superior in terms of the natural environment can provide a good foundation for economic growth..Convenient transportation plays an obviously positive role on economic growth. Fixed number of year of Education plays an obviously negative role on economic growth in the developed regions. The impact of Research and Development on the eastern region is strongest.Chapter VI shows situations of industry specialization and agglomeration and the effects of three geographic factors, on the national scale, the first industrial location entropy is positively relevant only to potential agricultural productivity; the second industrial entropy is closely connective with the second and three geographic factors. Third industrial entropy is connective with the first and second geographic factors significantly. To a major manufacturing sector, weanalyze the role of geographic factors, finding that the agglomeration of tobacco processing and textile gathered are affected by the first geographic factors, Electronic communications industry is a high-technology-intensive industries, mainly affected by the third geographic factors. Finally, we use resource intensity coefficient representing the mining relative abundance, and the result shows mineral resources abundance is the important factors of spurring industrial specialization, in addition to transportation, water resource.Chapter VII concludes the whole content, pointing out the deficiencies of the study and further research directions.