Imbalance measurement of regional economic quality development: evidence from China

Abstract

Imbalance of regional development trends is strongly correlated over time and across provinces, paralleled the growth of the economic quality and even influenced by exogenous variables. In this paper, a regional ‘two-way’ theory based on ‘input and output’ is proposed, reflecting the current state of economic quality development comprehensively. An ‘inverse absolute dispersion method’ came up with calculating the Quality of Economic Imbalance in Regional Development (QEIRD) after the measurement of economic quality is obtained by the total factor productivity (TFP). Moreover, the distribution of Chi-square is fitted to classify the grades of QEIRD, and the causes of QEIRD are analyzed via exogenous variables and regional decomposition under the panel data from China at the provincial level. The results indicate that the new method of measuring QEIRD based on TFP is scientific and reasonable in China at the country level. Secondly, the results obtained from the three regional decomposition ways are highly consistent, showing that the QEIRD from China has been diminishing, though not continuously and more so in some periods and regions, and being in a transition from stage three to stage two. Thirdly, the mainspring of total QEIRD is from the between-regions QEIRD; however, the rate of the within-region QEIRD is increasing cannot be neglected. In addition, exogenous variables have a crucial role in reducing QEIRD; it is a long-term and unremitting efforts to achieve stage one and move toward coordinated regional development in China.