| Since the reform and opening up, Anhui Province has achieved rapid economic development, and the industrial transformation of Yangtze River region has brought unprecedented opportunities for the province. However, regional disparity is an essential part for economic and social development. It’s the basis for the competition and cooperation between regions.As an agricultural province in Eastern China, the economic disparity between its regions never ended. When at an appropriate level, the disparity can bring positive impact to the economic and social development, but its expansion will cause severe problem in terms of justice and efficiency, which will hinder the social development. Therefore, this thesis analyzes the economic disparity between each region within Anhui Province and provides theoretical support and suggestions for its regional development.This research is based on the theory of regional economic disparity. It chooses15indexes from6aspects including economic aggregate, per capita GDP, industrial structure, living standard, education level and foreign trade and conducts analysis with the statistics from the2011Statistical Yearbook of Anhui Province.Chapter analyzes the characteristics of Anhui’s regional economic disparity from development level, economic structure, living standard, education level and foreign trade and comes to the following conclusion:There is severe economic disparity between regions of Anhui Province and so is the difference between economic structure; middle Anhui has higher living standard while northern part of the province has lower one, and this is same trend as the regional economic development level; the ranking of education level is similar with economic development level; in foreign trade, there is huge gap between the first ranking region and the last one, this shows that the regional disparity in foreign trade is in a severe state which requires immediate attention.Chapter Four conducts a thorough research and comprehensive evaluation about the regional economic disparity using the15indexes. Firstly, with the help of Principal Component Analysis, it generates the factor score and F total score of each region. Then it summarizes the structure of Anhui’s regional economic disparity through clustering analysis of the statistics. Finally, it comes to the conclusion that the17cities in Anhui province can be classified to4categories including developed region, fairly developed region, medium developed region and underdeveloped region. The regional economic disparity of Anhui is prominent that southern and northern regions are less developed than middle Anhui and there is imbalance within each region.Chapter Five analyzes the reason for the disparity from aspects of natural environment, resources and location, industrial structure concepts and population quality, as well as market situation. Based on the previous analysis, it comes to the conclusion that severe regional disparity will lead to the flow of human resource, labor resource and capital from less developed region to developed region, causing greater protectionism, which further deepens the assimilation of industrial structure. Then it provides suggestions for promoting the healthy and steady development of Anhui’s regional economic development. |
