中国八大区域经济发展质量的空间差异及其形成机制

Since the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China，the important goal of China’s regional economic development is to effectively improve regional economic development quality and promote the coordinated development of regional economy. In this context，identifying the spatial differences of China’s regional economic development quality and its formation mechanism is of theoretical and practical significance for achieving this important goal. However，there are still some deficiencies in the existing literature on the connotation interpretation and spatial differences of China’s economic development quality，especially on the systematic research of the spatial differences and formation mechanism of regional economic development quality. Based on the new development concept，this paper takes the realization of the vision of socialist modernization as the logical main line，and starts from the practical problems of unbalanced and insufficient regional economic development to construct an economic development quality evaluation system，which covers six dimensions，namely，innovation-driven development，coordinated development，market governance，green transformation，open economy and people’s livelihood. In this paper，the vertical and horizontal scatter degree method has been adopted to dynamically evaluate the economic development quality in China and its eight major regions；and the Dagum Gini coefficient and the variance decomposition method is used to analyze the regional differences and structural sources. On this basis，the formation mechanism is revealed and explained based on the spatial differentiation research framework of dimensional orientation-target identification-mechanism exploration. The results show significant spatial differentiation in terms of different dimensional orientation indexs in eight regions，and the coastal areas have long been ahead of the inland areas in each dimension，but they lag behind the inland areas in terms of growth rate. The growth rate of regional economic development quality index is stable，and shows a decreasing trend as listed in the following sequence：east coast-south coast-north coast-northeast China-middle reaches of the Yangtze River-middle reaches of the Yellow River-southwest region-northwest region. Inter-regional differences are the main contributors to the difference in spatial economic development quality，and show the characteristics of regional agglomeration. The structural sources of spatial differences are mainly open economy and green transformation，with a contribution rate of nearly 60%；the formation mechanism is mainly subject to dimensions such as coordinated development，market governance and green transformation，as well as factors such as poverty alleviation，innovation investment，urban-rural coordination，and market coordination. This paper contributes to the existing literature in two aspects. First，this paper clarifies the logical main line of economic development quality under the current development objectives and practical problems，so as to realize the unity of its connotation in depth and breadth. Specifically，based on the new development concept，this paper takes the basic realization of the long-term goal of socialist modernization as the logical main line，redefines the connotation of economic development quality from the reality of the current unbalanced and insufficient regional economic development. Second，this paper identifies the spatial differences and structural sources of regional economic development quality from a systematic perspective，and then reveals the formation mechanism of spatial differences through the research framework of dimensional orientation-target identification-mechanism exploration. This paper，to a certain content，reveals the spatial differences and formation mechanism of China’s regional economic development quality from a systematic perspective，which helps the government departments formulate a comprehensive improvement scheme of economic development quality according to the heterogeneous evolution characteristics of economic development quality of different regions，and provides policy support for the coordinated improvement of regional economic development quality.