Gansu's spatial-temporal pattern of regional economic disparities based on ESDA and GIS

By means of global and local spatial autocorrelation analyses of exploratory spatial data,the spatial dynamics of regional disparitics at the county level in Gansu were investigated by analyzing the per capita GDP data during 1990～2006 and using ArcView GIS and GeoDA software.Empirical results showed that the overall county-level spatial disparities of regional economy in Gansu had been greatly decreased over the past 16 years.The regions and their neighbors tended to have the similar trends towards shrinking the disparities of regional economy,especially for the counties in western or southern Gansu,the relatively highly (lowly) developed counties tended to be located near other highly (lowly) developed counties.Local Moran's I scatter plots and local indicators of spatial association cluster map were used to test the local patterns of the Gansu's economic development.It was proved that ESDA-GIS spatial analysis makes spatial heterogeneity of economic development more distinct and its visualization is thus strengthened.