Research On The Change Of Spatial Dependence Of Regional Income In China

Peripherality in the sense of economic geography is a constraint on regional income growth,which has been receiving widespread attention by governments and scholars for a long time.Since China's reform and opening up,with the rapid growth of China's economy,the spatial economic "core-periphery" structure in the sense of new economic geography has been forming in China from the east to the center and west,and the regional income gap has been widening continuously.The dependence on the disadvantaged economic geography factor becomes a long-term constraint on the growth of the income in the peripheral areas,and this type of dependence has been strengthening in a certain period of time,which is called the "curse of distance" effect by the scholars.In the past two decades,Chinese government has implemented a number of regional economic strategies to narrow the regional income gap.The productive public expenditure which is mainly used on infrastructure construction has been inclining to the peripheral areas.This inclined economic policy reduces the dependence of income on the disadvantaged economic geography factor of the peripheral areas,thus weakening the "curse of distance" effect and changing the spatial dependence of income in all regions in China to a certain extent.In this context,this paper presents some researches on the change of spatial dependence of regional income in China.This paper first introduces the development of the theory on spatial dependence of regional income,summarizes the advantages and the limitations in empirical research and theoretical research of new economic geography and spatial econometrics respectively,and puts forward a research path on spatial dependence of China's regional income which combines two theories together,and then carries out the following research works in the existence,the trends and the reason of the trends of space dependence of China's regional income:(1)Based on the existence of spatial autocorrelation in the error term of the new economic geography wage equation,the new economic geography wage equation and the spatial error model are combined into the general spatial model,which is used to carry out an empirical review of the space dependence of China's regional income considering space autocorrelation in both regional income and error term.The empirical results validate the existence of spatial dependence of China's regional income,which avoids the biased and inefficient wage equation estimation results of spatial dependence of regional income caused by ignoring the spatial autocorrelation in the error term.(2)Using the provincial level data of China from 1996 to 2015,the new economic geography wage equation is estimated year by year,and the trend of regional spatial income dependence in China is obtained.By analyzing the trend of change,it is found that the spatial dependence trend of China's regional income changed from strengthening to weakening in 2006,which is time-consistent with the background of China's regional economic strategy.Further analysis of the spatial dependence of regional income based on sub-samples shows that the weakening trend of spatial dependence of regional income is more obvious in central and western China where the regional economic strategies are mainly implemented,indicating that the central and western peripheral regions has been escaping the"curse of distance" since 2006.(3)Based on the public expenditure policies in China's regional economic strategy,an improved new economic geography model is established by bringing productive public expenditure and government behavior into the general equilibrium framework of new economic geography.This model is used to simulate the impacts of regional productive public expenditure policies on the spatial dependence of regional income,and the simulation results are verified by an empirical test.The results of the numerical simulation and of the empirical analysis indicate that the regional productive public expenditure has different impacts on the local income and the other region's income through marginal effect and externalities respectively,and then change the spatial dependence of regional income under the premise of a certain ratio of internal market potential to the external market potential.