A geospatial analysis of multi-scalar regional inequality in China and in metropolitan regions.

This paper provides a geospatial analysis of regional inequality across provinces, prefectures and counties in China from 1997 to 2010 under a comparative spatiotemporal conceptual framework. Despite significant spatial agglomeration at all spatial scales, the extent of agglomeration shows an obviously downward trend from 2003 to 2006. Substantially stronger agglomeration of economic development is demonstrated at county scales. Local indicators of spatial autocorrelation (LISA) are employed to visualize the local spatial characteristics of economic growth. Four snapshots (in the years 1997, 2001, 2005, and 2010) of LISA indicate a dramatic north-shifting of hot spots of economic growth in response to the northward movement of foreign investors and spatial agglomeration besides institutional forces in China. Furthermore, local spatial agglomeration demonstrates a heterogeneous process: hot spots of economic development along the coast, cold spots in western China and no significant spatial clusters in central China. As the major carries of scale economies, metropolitan regions see decreasing internal agglomeration during this period with the exception of the Yangtze River Delta area, which shows a strong spatial spillover into its neighbourhood. Finally, LISA Markov and geovisualization methods are employed to predict the long-run properties of spatial distribution in multi-scalar China. The results show that downward co-movements of a county with its neighbours are more frequently encountered, perhaps resulting in the continuous concentration of poor areas in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]