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| STUDY ON THE DECOMPOSITION OF THE REGIONAL ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES IN CHINA BASED ON DIFFERENT REGIONAL DIVISION SYSTEMS |
| LU Feng1, XU Jian-hua2 |
1. School of Geographical Science, Nantong University, Nanton 226007, China;
2. The Key Lab of GIS of the Ministry Education of, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China |
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Abstract The objective of this paper is to apply an inequality composition method, the two-stage nested Theil decomposition method, which is an extension of the ordinary one-stage Theil decomposition method, based on the different regional systems, to the study of regional inequalities in China. One of the innovation of this paper compared to those previously done studies on the same topic, is its multi-scale approach. This study adopts a bottom-up aggregation of spatial data, beginning with the administration unit of county, via those of prefecture and province, and ending by that of region, form county to prefecture to province to region. First of all, the regional inequalities is measured quantitatively in China from 1978 to 2001 by Theil indices based on province-level mean income. Then, considering the three-level hierarchical structure of a country, region-province-prefecture approach or via the region-province-county approach, the calculated Theil regional in equality index is further decomposed into the inter-regional and intra-regional sub-indices. The method uses a prefecture as the underlying regional unit to measure quantitatively overall regional income inequality, rather than a province which is chosen often by the most researchers in their study scope, and thus can analy ze the contribution of within-province inequalities as well as between-province and between-region inequalities to the overall regional income inequalities in a coherent framework. Secondly, this paper applies the two-stage nested Theil decomposition method to prefecture-level or county-level income and population data in China in 2001,to explore the spatial structure of and characteristics of within-provinces inequalities based on the different regional systems. To farther analyze the results, the three inequality components and the within-province inequalities in 2001 are analyzed in depth separately.
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Received: 24 November 2004
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2006, Vol. 21 
