Research On Regional Economic Development Disparities

With the rapid economic growth and gradually increasing national income, China's economy step onto a new level. However, what was followed are a number of issues, especially the regional economic disparity problem which have become a common and intensified phenomenon. Uneven regional development is not only a national problem, the performance within the region is also quite obvious. The existence of regional economic disparities can promote regional economic development, for it can provide the economically backward regions with intrinsic motivation to catch up. The negative effect, however, is more serious. It can intensify conflicts and even affect social stability.This paper selected Jiangsu Province as the research object, focused on the economic gap among the southern, the central and the northern part of Jiangsu Province, and discussed the influence factors as well. The methods of this paper mainly include comparative analysis and econometric analysis. As for the first method, the article analysis the deep reasons and the action mechanism of the regional economic gap through comparing similarities and differences between the three regions in Jiangsu Province; And as for the second method, this paper established econometric models using the panel statistic data with fixed effect to analysis the indexes of the economic development of Jiangsu province.This paper includes six parts:the first part is the introduction; second part is the theory and literature review, mainly about the regional economic development and the gap between them both at home and abroad; third part of the paper analysis the status and trends of the regional economic disparities in Jiangsu Province, specificly analysis the data of 13 cities of the province using indexes measuring regional economic disparities; fourth part is working on the changes in the regional economic disparities of Jiangsu Province; the fifth is about the impact factors of regional economic disparities, using the selected variables, the panel data and econometric model analytic methods; the last part is the conclusions of the paper.The conclusions of this paper are as follows:first, a higher level of the market is conducive to the economic growth, so the inter-regional differences of the market are one of the factors of the economic development gap; second, the regression coefficient for trade dependency was significantly positive, fully demonstrated the dominance of the opening up of the southern Jiangsu; third, foreign direct investment is also an important regional economic disparities factor, southern Jiangsu occupied a favorable position, which helped widening the economic gap between itself and the other two regions; forth, the coefficients for government spending variable show different signs, which indicating that government intervention is complex to narrow the regional economic disparities; fifth, the urban-rural income gap variable regression result is according with the expectations, which means the widening income gap between urban and rural areas would increase the regional economic disparities; sixth, the human capital variable coefficient is significantly positive, indicating the positive role in promoting economic growth; seventh, informationization level coefficient was significantly positive, indicating that the level of inter-regional differences in information technology also contributed to the factors influencing the regional economic disparities.