SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF EVOLVEMENT OF REGIONAL ECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN JIANGSU PROVINCE

In the first section of this paper we provide a background for this study by reviewing the exiting domestic and international studies on regional economical growth and spatial structure of the economic inequality in China and Jiangsu province,and put out the primary objective of this study is to illustrate the relationship between spatial inequality evolvement and regional economic growth in Jiangsu province.In the second and third section of the paper we explain a set of methodologies of regional economic inequality and a measure of separation between groups of regions,using a consistent data of gross domestic production per capita,by taking 67 cities and counties in Jiangsu province as geography study units,this paper make a quantitative analysis of measuring the variety characteristic of regional economical inequality in Jiangsu province since the economic reforms of 1978 in China.By the decomposition of Theil index,it shows that the dominant sources of overall regional inequality in Jiangsu province in the gross domestic production per capita have shifted from rural-urban to intrarural inequality.The interregional inequalities among the southern Jiangsu(Sunan), the central Jiangsu(Suzhong) and the northern Jiangsu(Subei) have been widen. In the fourth section of the paper,using a separation index recently developed measures based on regional inequality decompositions,we make a quantitative analysis of the relationship between regional economic growth and spatial structure varieties in Jiangsu province.The general conclusion that we draw from this paper of the analysis is that the continuous growth of diverging among Sunan,Suzhong and Subei areas and the continuous growth of converging between cities and counties in response to regional economic growth in Jiangsu province.To illustrate the preposition that county and city trajectories of economic growth determine the changes regional inequality,each county and city per capita GDP was compared to the corresponding province average in 1978,1983,1993,1999 and 2003 to see if a county or city had been converging to the average or diverging from 19781983,1983-1993,1993-1999,and 1999-2003.We find four regional types are divided by the trends of all cities and counties such as downwardly converging(cities),upwardly converging(countries),upwardly diverging(Sunan) and downwardly diverging(Suzhong and Subei).