Empirical Research On The Regional Disparities Of Basic Education Informatization Development In China

Informatization of basic education, which is an important part of national informatization strategy, has grown rapidly due to governments' efforts. However, there are still many problems in the process of informatization, especially the problem of unbalanced development among different areas, which not only hampers the sustainable development of the, but also derives a new educational equity. And so, it is practically significant to analyze the regional disparities in basic education informatization, research the formation mechanism of the regional imbalance and come up with strategies to promote coordinated development of basic education informatization among regions, not only for enriching the theoretical study on the educational informatization but also for narrowing the gap between regions and promoting the sustained and sound development of educational informatization in China.This paper uses the theories of basic education, informatics, regional economics, econometrics and the existing relevant references to systematically analyze the regional disparities in basic education informatization with a method of combining theory and practice, which in perspective of three regions including eastern, middle and western regions. The research work of this dissertation is mainly reflected in four aspects: the paper, first of all, deeply analyzes the elementary theories regarding the topic and forms the theoretical framework of this study; Secondly, establishes the evaluation indicator system of the basic education informatization and uses this indicator system to measure the development level of the basic education informatization from 2004 to 2013 in China, after that it also comparatively analyzes the development situation of the 31 provinces with the method of clustering; Thirdly, uses Theil index to measure the gap of three regions and summarizes the varying characteristics of regional disparities. Finally, empirically analyzes the impact of various factors on the regional disparities and draws out the development strategy for the next step in accordance with the relevant conclusions.Main results of this paper are as follows: the development level of China's basic education informatization has decreased gradually from east to west in 2004 to 2013, and the gap between different regions couldn't be ignored. The analysis which based on the Theil index shows that the gaps of the overall and three regions has been narrowing with a slight fluctuation.As for the three regions, the greatest disparity was the western region, followed by eastern region and middle region is the smallest. According to the decomposition results, the average contribution rate of difference within the region to the overall is smaller than the difference between the region, so the difference between the region is the main reason to cause the overall difference. Socio-economic development level, neighbor effect and local government support all had significant positive impact on the level of basic education informatization in the three regions, which verified some of the proposed assumptions above. The level of social informatization only had significant positive effect on the eastern and middle regions, and had positive influence on the western region but it's not significant. The research of this paper has two aspects of innovation: first one, broadening the scope of the study, using 10-yeasrs panel data to analysis the regional differences; second one, using the empirical research method to analysis the regional differences, including AHP, clustering analysis, Theil index and the panel data model.