Identification of Spatial Economic Structure in Jiangsu Province by Applying Exploratory Spatial Data Statistics

The feasibility of exploratory spatial data analysis(ESDA) in analyzing regional economic disparities is firstly explored in this paper.Then,we use ESDA method to investigate the spatial economic structure at the county level in Jiangsu from 1988 to 2009.Both global and local spatial autocorrelation analysis strategies based on the rules of rook contiguity and arc distance contiguity spatial weights are used during the investigation.The analysis results based on the rules of rook contiguity spatial weights show that the evolution of Jiangsu spatial-economic organization can be discriminated as four stages: ①From 1988 to 1992,the disparity of regional economy was not significant.②From 1993 to 1996,the county-level spatial disparities of regional economy had significant effect between southern and northern Jiangsu.③From 1997 to 2002,the polarization effect remitted to a certain extent for whole province.④From 2003 to 2008,there was a huge gap of regional economy between northern and southern Jiangsu.Moreover,according to the analysis results based on the rules of arc distance spatial weights,the range of spatial-economic influence in Jiangsu is observed less than 240 km,which indicates that the growing-up of southern Jiangsu only has significant effect on the regions along the Yangtze River other than the coastal areas.There is a need to pay more attention to develop the coastal areas and reduce the county-level regional differences in Jiangsu.