The Empirical Study Of The Economic Development Gap Between Central And Eastern Region After The Reforms

China's economic development has made remarkable achievements after the reforms. The government has implemented strategies to promote regional economy, including eastern opening, western developing, northeast revitalizing and central rising. Considering the factors of history, society, culture and polity, it was still unbalanced for some provinces in our country. Especially, the growing speed of central China was slowest due to prosperity of eastern and attaction of western. Therefore, the economic devolopment of central China is an overall problem related to the harmonious society, and now it has become a hot academic issue.This paper analyzed empirically on the factors of the economic development gap between eastern and central China. Firstly, we selected the coefficients of Variation, Gini and Theil as measure, using them to process the data from 1978 to 2009, and showing the trends by a line chart. Secondly, we worked out the theoretical framework according to the actual situation of economic development of eastern and central China.The framework was consisted of internal factors such as natural resource endowment and external factors such as market process.In the empirical analysis, we selected three economic indicators to further study the reasons of the economic development gap between eastern and central China, including the fiscal decentralization system, the market process and the degree of opening up. The detail steps are as follows:First of all, we checked the correlation of the indicators and the gap. By the data of 16 provinces in eastern and central China from 1978 to 2009, we calculated the natural logarithm of Theil coefficients of the indicators and the gap, and used the linear regression analysis on the corresponding one-year lagged Theil coefficients. The results confirmed that the key reasons reflecting economic development gap bewteen eastern and central China are three indicators we discussed above.Finally, facing specific problems of actual situation of central China, the paper highlighted three strategic advice about promoting central China, which has a positive significance for its theoretical reference on economic development.