Agglomeration And Regional Economic Development Gap Analysis

In the era of economic globalization, the spatial distribution of industrial activity tends to agglomerate instead of balancing and industrial agglomeration becomes a worldwide economic phenomenon. Eastern China distinguished by industrial agglomeration take the lead to turn into developed regions. So we can see that industrial agglomeration plays a more and more important role in regional development. Recently there are two problems in researches on industrial agglomeration and regional disparity. On one hand although the relationship between the two is certain, impact factors of regional disparity are neglected. On the other hand regression model is built to tell positive and negative effect when regional disparity is simply measured by regional GDP share, but relevant influence is not quantized. This thesis creatively analyses impact factors of regional disparity and quantizes their influence extent. All researches above make up domestic research gap.The thesis focuses on regional disparity from the perspective of industrial agglomeration, rather than industrial cluster or the relevant relationship between industrial cluster and economic growth. Above all, New Economic Geography as a new angle of view to research regional development disparity is found. On its basis this paper further explores the generation mechanism of industrial agglomeration and its improvement effect on regional economic growth. After that, empirical analysis about regional economic disparity is conducted. According to the results of regression model and regional inequality's decomposition, the thesis explains the factors which affect economic growth and regional disparity. Finally the conclusion is drawn that promoting consumption to increase domestic demand and adopting agglomeration policy are efficient to stabilize economic growth and harmonize regional development. These provide some suggestions to adjust the strategy of regional economic development, thus this research possesses certain applicable value and realistic sense.In regard to econometric model, three factors such as location&factor gift, economic structure&policy and new economic geography are applied to explain regional economic development in regression model estimated by feasiable generalized least square(FGLS) method of dealing with heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation. What'more, pannel data are processed as follows. Firstly, all the explantory varibles lag behind one year to reduce endophytism. Secondly, value index and price index are used to eliminate price effect. Finally, the logarithm of per capita GDP makes slope coefficient stand for impact on economic growth rate. Concerning the decomposition of regional inequality measured by Gini Coefficient, overall inequality is decomposed into explantory varibles'effect and residuals'effect under the regression decomposion framework. So factor's influence on regional disparity is revealed in a more scientific way.Empirical evidence finds that: (a) Such policy oriention as overdue education, patent application and fixed asset investment have reduced economic growth rate to some extent and have contributed to narrow economic gap accordingly; (b) Foreign trade and geographical factor can still promote growth rate, but excessive control of social resources by government has the opposite effect; (c) The impact of producer services development and industry upgrade on growth has spatial characteristics. In coastal regions, industrial agglomeration and the tertiary industry development lead to the rise of dispersion forece from trade cost and the reduction of the second industry's effect. On the contrary, the advantage of backwardness in non-coastal regions is more and more apparent; (d) Local market demand, labor productivity and enterprise density have become powerful motive force to sustainable development and have induced the enlargement of inequality.