Analysis Of Regional Economic Disparity In Relation To The Local Education Development In Hunan Province

Regional economic disparities are universal and international issues.Since the reform and opening-up, the regional economic disparities in China have become more and more significant. The disparities are not only among eastern,western and central China,among the different provinces in China, also among the internal regions of each province. Hunan province is one of the core provinces in Rise of Central China Plan and is one of the most economically advanced and active provinces in Midwest China as well. Due to the different geographic locations, infrastructure developments as well as the influences of policy factors, there exists significant regional economic disparities within Hunan. This paper focuses on the perspective of local education development, because, on one hand, Hunan province needs to depend on education to transfer the area from a populous province to an educational advanced province to achieve the economical sustainable development; On the other hand, education has an undisputable driving effect on economic development. Therefore, from the education perspective to analyze the regional economic disparity problem has an important practical significance.This paper, using the data from the year1989to2012, analyzes the economic and educational development of three regions in Hunan province. The regional economic disparity analysis comprises absolute difference description and relative difference description. The absolute difference description includes calculations of ranges, average deviations and standard deviations while relative difference description is analyzing extreme value ratio and coefficient of variation. From the above analysis, the conclusion that the absolute and relative differences of economic development level in the three regions emerged expanding trend can be drew. The area around Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan has the highest economic level, followed by Southern Hunan and Western Hunan.Regional educational disparity is analyzed by education scale, education investment and education structure. The area around Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan has the highest education level, Southern and Western Hunan are in the similar level. In order to study the driving effect of education on regional economy in detail, we build panel data model base on Cobb-Douglas production function. The result shows that education in the area around Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan yields the highest economic contribution degree, followed by Western Hunan, then Southern Hunan has the lowest contribution degree. Next, we use Grey correlation analysis to study the influences of different education level on the regional economy. We calculate the contribution degrees of secondary and higher education to the economies in the three regions and found that the contribution degrees of higher education exceed that of secondary education. Based on the analysis above, the paper summarizes the unbalanced problem of regional economy and education development and proposes a series of specific advices of educational reform according to the different characteristics of economic development in each region.