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Administrative Boundary Changes and Regional Inequality in Provincial China

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Abstract

Although many studies have been conducted on regional inequality, no consistent findings can be produced in terms of the temporal trends and mechanisms underlying regional inequality until now. It is widely acknowledged that the utilization of different data sources, time periods and methodologies gives rise to different measurements of regional inequality. This study aims to shed new light on this issue from the perspective of administrative boundary changes in China. Since the reform and open-door policy in 1978, administrative divisions in China have frequently been adjusted as part of a strategy of the State to promote rapid economic development. This strategy poses a great challenge to the study of temporal trends as well as the causal mechanisms for regional inequality, which has been rarely studied. Taking the Chinese province of Guangdong as an example, this paper adopts a multi-scale decomposition method to demonstrate that administrative boundary changes have a significant impact on the measurement of regional inequality. By excluding administrative boundary changes, previous studies often portrayed a misleading picture of the divergence or convergence of regional inequality. Drawing on a multi-scale and multi-mechanism framework, this paper employs a spatial regression model to investigate the impact of administrative boundary changes on extracting mechanisms of regional inequality. On the one hand, administrative restructuring alters the intensity of spatial dependence of regional development. On the other hand, different combinations of significant driving factors vary under different administrative divisions. Therefore, the consideration of administrative boundary changes would enhance a fuller understanding of regional inequality in China.

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Notes

  1. For details of China’s hierarchical administrative/spatial system see Zhang & Wu (2006, p.7). A province in China, in the simplest case, is formed by a number of prefecture-level cities. An prefecture-level city can be formed by urban districts (e.g. Shenzhen), or with one or more county(ies) or/and county-level city(ies). Because of data availability, the multiple urban districts within each prefecture-level city is analyzed, and referred to, in this paper as one urban district.

  2. The authors ran a multivariate regression model to identify the most importance factor for use in our analysis among the followings: topography (represented by three variables: average elevation, average slope, and the percentage of area within a spatial unit with the slope smaller than 10 %), the ability to participate in international trade (approximated by the distance from each spatial unit to the coast), transportation cost (represented by the average transportation cost in hours from each spatial unit to others) and supply of natural resource (quantified by forest coverage rate) is determined by running a multivariate regression model. Average elevation had stood out to be our choice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Administration, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Hongshan district, Wuhan, China

    Sanwei He

  2. Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, London, UK

    Calvin King Lam Chung

  3. School of Economics and Management, Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen, China

    Mucahid Mustafa Bayrak

  4. Institute of Urban Planning Engineering and Information Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Weiwu Wang

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  1. Sanwei He
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  2. Calvin King Lam Chung
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  4. Weiwu Wang
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Correspondence to Weiwu Wang.

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He, S., Chung, C.K.L., Bayrak, M.M. et al. Administrative Boundary Changes and Regional Inequality in Provincial China. Appl. Spatial Analysis 11, 103–120 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-016-9203-5

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