Regional Externalities,Openness and Conditional Convergence in China

Regional economic development disparity is an objective phenomenon in the development process.Advances in spatial autocorrelation and regression analyses provide methods to assess the influence of these spillovers on the geographical distribution and regional economics development.Based on the model of neoclassical theory of growth,the paper puts forward a spatial econometric analytical framework of β convergence of regional economic development with the cross-sectional data through 1978-2005 in China's provinces and analyzes the spatial externalities effects of β convergence.Our regression results show that there was not absolute β convergence through 1978-2005,but with the introduction of spatial spillovers and openness variable in the econometric model,there was a more significant statistically conditional β convergence.