Regional Disparities Research

Regional development is a necessary stage in the process of the national economic and social development over the years. Governments have been committed to ensuring the economy to move forward as a whole under the premise of promoting regional coordination and common development and continued to narrow the gap between regions. On the basis of the research of many scholars at home and abroad, this paper selected the statistic data in human capital, industrial structure, investment in physical capital, infrastructure and other aspects between 1996 and 2009, and discussed the origin of the difference of our Regional Economic development using the shift-share analysis, Theil coefficient and analysis of panel data model. We also used ARIMA models to predict the future direction of the gap in quantitatively from absolute and relative aspects, and judged the trend of regional economic development from the qualitative aspects.In the first part of this paper, we analyzed the factors that influenced the GDP using Shift-share analysis method between the East, Central and Western provinces from 1996 to 2009, and studied components in the total growth rate in the region, share components, industrial structure and competitiveness of deviation from the components. The results showed that the development of the eastern region had obvious advantages. Although the development had achieved some results in vast central and western regions, the gap was still large and far below the national average, especially in the industrial structure. Secondly, we analyzed the status of Chinese regional economic disparities from absolute gap and relative gap. The results showed that the economic development of regional economy experience three stages, namely first narrow, then expand, and then narrow.In the model, we constructed panel data model using a cross-section of provinces, and analyzed with the actual situation. The results showed human capital, industrial structure was the main factors in driving rapid economic growth in East areas; infrastructure and capital investment were two factors of the regional economic disparities in widening the regional economic disparities; Human capital had some impact on the economic of the middle areas.Subsequently, we predicted the trend of the gap from 2010 to 2015 in both absolute gap and relative gap using the ARIMA model. The results showed that the gap between China's regional economic developments will become increasingly smaller in next few years.Finally, On the basis of theory and model, we put forward several policy recommendations for regional economic development.