Analyzing regional economic disparities based on ESDA

Region is an open system.The economic growth in each region not only depends on its own characteristics,but also on those of the regions that form the neighborhood to which it belongs.Growth poles theory or core-periphery pattern suggests that different spatial interactions between a region and its neighbors can enlarge or lessen regional disparities.Unfortunately,the traditional approaches to regional disparities suppose that each region is independent from others,so they just evaluate the regional disparity variations of "isolated" regions and cannot tell the dynamics of interrelated regions.This paper firstly explores the feasibility of exploratory spatial data analysis(ESDA) in analyzing regional economic disparities.Unlike traditional statistical methods,such as coefficients of variation,ESDA can incorporate spatial effects into the analysis of regional disparities,identifying global and local disparities at the regional scale and visualizing the spatial distribution and patterns through Moran scatterplots or maps.By means of global and local spatial autocorrelation analyses,this paper then investigates the spatial dynamics of regional disparities at the county level in Jiangsu by analyzing per capita GDP data,1978-2002.Empirical results show that after more than 20 years of reforms and opening-up,the overall county-level spatial disparities of regional economy in Jiangsu have been greatly decreased over time.Moreover,the regions and their neighbors tend to have the similar trends towards shrinking the disparities of regional economy,especially the counties(or cities) in southern or northern Jiangsu.Thirdly,the significant spread or trickling-down effect has been observed across southern Jiangsu since 1992.But for the whole province,its polarization effect is beyond its spread effect because significant lagging areas located in northern Jiangsu have appeared with the growing up of southern Jiangsu.Finally,the reduction of county-level regional disparities in Jiangsu is not the symbol of regional development in a coordinated way,indicating the spatial ramifications of the whole regional economy into two different clubs through the process of cumulative causation.