The Yangtze Delta: Its Regional Economic Disparities And Sources Of Growth

The regional inequality is an important proposition of regional economics, which will affect the economic prosperity and social stability of a country or a region. Since21 centry, with opening wilder to the outside world, the Yangtze delta has exploited its advantages in geography, high-quality work-force, good infrastructure and preferential investment policies. This makes it become the most attractive area for the foreign investment.However, in this process, the internal splits has begun to speed up and the spatiail clustering has been more significant, while the regional economic inequalities become more seriously.On the basis of summarizing the research achievements about regional economic inequality at home and abroad, this thesis analyses the spatial pattern and its changes of regional economic inequalities in Yangtze delta during the period 1995 to 2005, and confirm that if there is some spatial association among the cities of Yangtze delta. The result reveals strong evidence of spatial autocorrelation as well as significant patterns of local spatial association. Based on above analysis, we summarize several laws about the spatial pattern and its changes of regional economic inequalities in Yangtze delta: (l)the regional economic pattern of Yangtze delta developed from one center to multi-center; (2) the economy grows with significant spatial clustering and the economic growth center has moved from south part to the north part.;( 3) the result reveals strong evidence of spatial autocorrelation in regional economic growth of Yangtze delta; (4) the regional economic inequalities of Yangtze delta developed with distinct spatial constructure and local characteristics.In addition, this thesis analyses the factors which influence the regional economic inequalities of Yangtze delta, such like capital, labor, system, industrial structure and so on, and caculates their contributions at the same time.At the end, we give out some workable suggestions in order to reduce the regional economic inequalities and achieved the coordinated development of the whole region .