Regional economic disparity in China is an important aspect of academic inquiry and is one of the major concerns facing governments as it may threaten national unity and social stability. The trends and forces underlying regional inequality have been the subject of heated debates, but most scholarly studies focus on the broad aggregate trends of economic disparity among provinces and interregional inequality across China's eastern, central, and western regions, and pay little attention to investigating inter-province inequality. This paper aims at detailed evolvement of regional development strategies, and reveals its impacts on changes of regional economic inequality through a case study of Jiangsu province.
In this paper, we examine the tendency of regional economic inequality in per-capital GDP among the cities and counties of Jiangsu province with Gini coefficients and Theil index during the period 1978-2001. Jiangsu province can generally be divided into three parts:the developed southern Jiangsu(Sunan), moderately central Jiangsu (Suzhong),and poor northern Jiangsu(Subei). By the decomposition of the Theil index, the main performance of regional economic inequality in Jiangsu province consists in differences among the southern Jiangsu, the central Jiangsu and the northern Jiangsu. The internal difference in southern Jiangsu is minimum, and contribution total difference has already seemed to be insignificant. The spatial disparities within rural county have increased sharply since the economic reforms of 1978.
The strategy of balanced development, unbalanced development and development of northern Jiangsu influences the different speeds of regional economic growth among cities and counties of Jiangsu province. The evolvement of regional development strategies reflects the changes of regional inequality. This paper analysis the relation between the current development strategy of region along Yangtze river and economic inequality in Jiangsu province. On the face of regional integrates, moderately balancing polices and countermeasures should carried out right then, so as to make the region along Yangtze river in Jiangsu province and northern Jiangsu develop harmoniously and control the widening economic differences among the cities and counties of Jiangsu province.