Evolution of temporal-spatial disparities of county economic development level in Lanzhou-Xining city-and-town concentrated areas

Region is an open system,the economic growth in each region not only depends on its own characters,but also on those of the regions that form the neighborhood to which it belongs.Nowadays,there is a wide gap on the level of socio-economic development across regions in China,and the imbalance in economic development is also a common phenomenon.Although the imbalance caused by the regional economic development gap is inevitable,and its existence has a reasonable side,their expansion is bound to affect the sustainable development of China's economy and society.Growth pole theory and core-periphery pattern suggest 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 the others,so they just evaluate the region disparity variations of isolate regions and cannot tell the dynamics of interrelated regions.Based on the economic development statistics of 35 counties in Lanzhou-Xining CTCAs,this paper evaluates the county economic level in principal component analysis by SPSS 16.0 statistical software,and shows the results by ARCGIS 9.3 analysis software.According to the economic development level scores,the 35 counties are divided into four main categories.Then we analyze the spatial differences of county economic development level between 2000 and 2008 and its evolution trend from 2000 to 2008.The main conclusions are as follows: the developed counties and the developing counties distribute along the valley of Yellow River in Gansu Provence and Huangshui River and Yellow River in Qinghai Provence,Lanzhou City and Baiyin City have been both economic cores of Lanzhou-Xining CTCAs.The spatial pattern of economic development level show east-west disparities,the undeveloped counties gathered in the eastern region,and the underdeveloped counties gathered in the western region.The spatial distribution of the relatively low economic level counties gather together and the relatively high economic level counties dispersed,and the effect of spatial polarization is more significant.The quantity of county economic development level categories show a pyramid order,the economic development level of Lanzhou-Xining CTCAs is still at the initial stage of economic development.The changes in the development levels of county economy is more stable in the overall and is significant fluctuations in the local.The overall polarization is continued to intensify,and the surrounding mostly counties of Lanzhou City remains the same,individual counties around Lanzhou City is still degraded from the underdeveloped county to the undeveloped county and is increased trend of contiguous distribution.The local diffusion is gradually to appear,and the surrounding mostly counties of Xining City is still upgraded from the undeveloped county to the underdeveloped county and also showed pattern of contiguous distribution.The phenomenon in county economic development levels of pyramid order still exists,mainly due to lack of transition and support of middle economic level counties.