Measuring and Spatio-Temporal Evolution for the Late-Development Advantage in China’s Provinces

Abstract

The coordinated development of regional economies is a major economic goal of many countries around the world. To that end, China has actively carried out a series of strategies to expedite the development of its late-developing regions. This study explores the issues raised by this coordinated development from the perspective of late-development advantages, which refer to a region’s late-development advantages compared with the early-developing regions in the country. The 15 indicators applied for evaluating the late-development advantages fall into five categories including capital, technology, industrial structure, institutions and human resources. Then, the model of entropy-weighted technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (EW-TOPSIS) is applied to evaluate the late-development advantages of China’s provinces. Following this, ArcGIS and GeoDa are used to analyze the spatio-temporal evolution pattern of the late-development advantages of China’s provinces, and to compare the spatio-temporal effect of these advantages between the provinces. The results show that the overall late-development advantages of China’s provinces had a downward trend from 2006 to 2015, with the Eastern Region falling by 8.07%, the Central Region falling by 14.37% and the Western Region falling by 8.05%, indicating that the development gap between China’s Eastern and Western Regions is still large. The temporal effect analysis shows the temporal autocorrelation changes from positive status to negative status with the increase of lagging order, which means the trend of late-development advantage will reverse over time. The spatial effect analysis shows there were only significant Low-Low and Low-High aggregation in 2006 and 2010, but significant High-High and High-Low aggregations emerge in 2012 and 2015, implying that the development environment has effectively promoted the use of the provincial late-development advantage. The research results could provide theoretical basis for the policy making of the accelerating development of late-developing regions in China.