The Analysis To Regional Economic Growth And Convergence In China

Economic growth convergence theory has become one of the most popular topics in the study of the economic growth theory since the 1990s.The core of this issue is to inspect the differences of the economic growth rate among different economical bodies or different regions within a country, and investigate the reasons for the differences. Since 1978, China has obtained the great achievements in economic growth, however, the development is unbalanced, the widening of regional gap has become one of the biggest challenges that influence the sustainable development. The research of regional gap is important both in theory and in practice.In this article, we start from the convergence of the economic growth to deepen our understanding of the regional development gaps in China, studying the inner reasons of the convergence or divergence fact of China's regional economic growth in the period 1978-2007.There are four chapters in this article. Chapter 2 gives a brief introduction of the convergence theory, making a review of this topic, which includes the empirical research focused on the economic growth convergence in different countries and regions.Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 use several econometric methods to investigate the convergence or divergence of Chinese regional economic growth during the period 1978-2007.Based on the analysis of the previous chapters, the conclusions are drawn as follow:there isσ-convergence since 1978, but when the period is divided into three stages,1978-1993,1994-2002 and 2003-2007, we can find that, only the second stage, from 1994 to 2002, there is no absolute regional convergence; the convergent trend can be detected in other two stages. There exists absolute convergence among the provinces in the eastern regions during 1980-2007, so the club convergence is existent in the regional economic growth in this stage; but it is not the case in the central and western regions; From 1978 to 2007, there exists the conditional convergence, which means that the average investment rate and the population have a significant positive effect on the growth of the average GDP. The eastern regions contribute a lot to this kind of convergence. Refer to the convergence of the central and western regions, it is not obvious even there is possibility of the divergence.Based on the analysis above, this paper presents the corresponding policy in order to promote the convergence mechanism of economic growth to works well and Chinese regional economy develops coordinately.