Social Welfare, Economic Growth And Regional Development Difference

Studying the evolution of China’s regional economic development strategy, we can divide the period since the implement of reform and opening policy into three parts: non-balanced development, non-proportional coordinated development, balanced and coordinated development stages. In order to study regional developmental difference and find out the historical reason of it’s trend, this paper, taking the changing of regional development strategy as the master line, elaborates the evolution of the regional development thoughts and the integral development pattern, based on which builds a complete regional economic development system.Besides, regional developmental difference also comes from the changing of social welfare, economic growth and the internal influence between them. In other words, The coordinative development between social welfare and economic growth represents a high level of regional developmental quality. By employing the panel data of Chinese provinces over the period 2003 to 2009 as a sample, this paper firstly measures the changing features of social welfare and economic growth, secondly studies coordination degree and provincial difference of them through coupling model, finally examines the effects of growth on welfare, thus making a comprehensive picture of China’s regional development difference.The major conclusions are as follows:there exists significant regional difference of social welfare and economic growth. Besides, the level of social welfare will decline after reaching the turning point of each area. The decrease of coordination degree and the arrival of turning points of social welfare will deteriorate the coupling trend. At present, economic growth still places a leading role so that it remains to be the key way to eliminate regional difference. Therefore, each province should play the leading role of economic growth and accelerate the transformation of economic development model, promoting the coordinative development of growth and welfare, finally deepen the construction of harmonious society.