Analysis on club spatial convergence of regional economic growth in Gansu Province

By means of global and local spatial autocorrelation analyses of exploratory spatial data analysis(ESDA),this paper investigates the spatial dynamics of regional disparities at the county level in Gansu Province by analyzing per capita GDP data during 1991—2004,with the support of ArcView GIS and GeoDA software.Empirical results show that:the overall county-level spatial disparities of regional economy in Gansu Province have been greatly decreased over past 13 years;Moreover,the regions and their neighbors tend to have the similar trends towards shrinking the disparities of regional economy,especially the counties in western or southern Gansu,that is,the relatively high(low) developed county tends to be located nearby other high(low) developed counties more often than expected due to random chance.Local Moran's I scatter plots and LISA(local indicators of spatial association)cluster map have been used to test the local pattern of the Gansu economic development.It has been proved that ESDA-GIS spatial analysis makes spatial heterogeneity of economic development more distinctly,and strengthens its visualization.