Analyzing Provincial Border-Regional Economic Disparities Based on ESDA and GIS: A Case Study of Hohhot-Baotou-Ordos-Yulin Economic Zone

Provincial border-regions are a new research field of economic divergence.This paper used counties as the basic study unit and analyzed the spatial differences of 14 economic indexes by using factor analysis methods and ESDA-GIS to reveal the spatial characteristics of economic differences in Hohhot-Baotou-Ordos-Yulin Economic Zone.The following conclusions can be drawn as follows.(1) A non-balanced development pattern of quantity has been presented,which indicates that the strong ones take the trend of polarization,and the weak ones become weaker.(2) The regional spatial structure presents that the county-level economic power increases from east to west and decreases from south to north.(3) County-level economic strength scores of Global Moran's I is 0.3215,presenting a strong characteristic ofconvergence clubs.(4) Diffuse pattern,polarization pattern,sinkingpattern andinfectionpattern present a core-periphery sphere structure;but it is not an obvious one.It is found that four factors including economic investment,economic benefits,human resources and economic structure are quite distinct from each other in terms of spatial concentration.