Dynamic Measurements,Spatial-Temporal Disparities And Influencing Factors Analysis Of High-Quality Economic Development In China

Since stepping into the 21 st century,the economic development in China has made remarkable achievements,whose rapid growth nevertheless relies on a huge input in production factors such as land,resources and labor,compromising the social interests;severe environmental pollution,general overcapacity,insufficient high-end production capacity and uneven regional development are becoming increasingly prominent.As pointed out in the report of the 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China again,the China’s economy has shifted from a stage of high-speed growth to a stage of high-quality development,where the latter has become a new theme after China enters the new era.Meanwhile,the high-quality economic development(HQED)presents the dual advantages of maintaining ecological balance and promoting sustainable economic development,whose growth has always been in dynamic evolution.Therefore,this paper reveals the evolution trend and spatio-temporal disparities of China’s HQED from a continuous and dynamic perspective and analyzes its influencing factors and characteristics of convergence,with the specific research content as follows:Firstly,to comprehensively measure the continuous dynamic evolution trend of China’s HQED,this paper constructs high-quality economic development indicator system from five dimensions including economic vitality,innovation efficiency,green development,people’s livelihood and social harmony based on the data from 30 provinces in the eight major comprehensive economic regions of China from 2000 to2020 and employs the functional entropy weight method to construct a functional highquality economic development index model(HQEDI(t)),to measure the level of China’s HQED in different dimensions and different regions.The research results show that the entropy weights in each dimension of China’s HQED presents a continuous variation feature during the observation period;the overall trend of entropy weight changes in each dimension is "innovation efficiency > economic vitality > people’s livelihood > social harmony > green development”;the innovation efficiency dimension gradually presents a dominant advantage in measuring China’s HQED;as a whole,the level of China’s HQED is not high,whose development trend,however,is improving,showcasing a spatial decreasing distribution pattern of “east coast-north coast-south coast-northeast-middle reaches of the Yangtze River-middle reaches of the Yellow River-southwest-northwest”.Secondly,to test the spatio-temporal disparities in China’s HQED and further unveil the spatial and dimensional sources of the disparities,this paper draws on the functional analysis of variance(f-ANOVA)to verify the spatio-temporal disparities in the high-quality development levels of the eight comprehensive economic regions in China,and makes use of the functional Dagum Gini coefficient to decompose the spatio-temporal disparities in the China’s HQED.The research results show that there are significant disparities in the absolute levels and growth rates of HQED among the eight major comprehensive economic regions in China;nonetheless,there is no inherent driving force for deepening the disparities in terms of acceleration;the overall regional disparities in China’s HQED are exhibiting a downward trend,and the regional disparities are the dominant factor in the overall disparities in China’s HQED;the disparities between the three major coastal regions and the southwest and northwest regions are relatively significant,with the smallest disparities between the middle reaches of the Yellow River and the middle reaches of the Yangtze River;from the perspective of dynamic evolution,the disparities between the three major coastal regions and the southwest region demonstrate a fluctuating downward trend,while the disparities with the northwest region present a gradual upward trend.Finally,to screen and determine the significant influencing factors of HQED,this paper analyzes the dynamic and time-varying impact of each influencing factor on China’s HQED,and defines the continuous convergence state of HQED in each region during the sample observation period.This paper leverages the variance inflation factor(VIF)and LASSO method under a functional regression model to screen and determine the influencing factors of HQED,and constructs a functional spatial autoregressive model to analyze the dynamic and time-varying impact of each influencing factor on China’s HQED,with which as the control variable the convergence and divergence characteristics of HQED in China are verified based on the functional spatial convergence model.The research results show that based on the previous literature research,six significant influencing factors were ultimately identified considering the correlation and endogeneity among various influencing factors;during the sample period,the improvement of science and education level,high-tech income generation,investment level,external economy and marketization had a significant positive promoting effect on HQED;however,the promoting effect of high-tech income generation on HQED weakened in the long term,and the consumption structure upgrade presents a time-varying characteristic in promoting the HQED;furthermore,the overall level of China’s HQED exhibits significant ? convergence,absolute ?convergence,and conditional ? convergence.From a regional perspective,there is ?convergence in the north coast,east coast,the middle reaches of the Yellow River and the middle reaches of the Yangtze River;there is no absolute ? convergence in the high-quality economic development levels of the north coast,south coast,southwest and northeast;after adding control variables,there is significant conditional ?convergence in the north coast,east coast,the middle reaches of the Yangtze River,the middle reaches of the Yellow River,southwest and northwest.Having a good knowledge of the dynamic evolution trend,spatio-temporal disparities,influencing factors,and convergence and divergence characteristics of China’s HQED,which are essentially continuous,is of great significance for steadily promoting China’s HQED.This paper enriches the research on dynamic measurement of HQED,provides the decision-makers with dynamic measurement guidelines,helps achieve the coordinated development among various regions,promotes the overall level of China’s HQED and formulates the targeted measures for China to explore the effective routes for HQED.There are 23 figures,5 tables,and 103 references in this paper.