Reexamination of the Economic Differentiation between North and South China:A Dual Perspective on the Movement of the Economic Dividing Line and the Decomposition of the Contribution to Growth Rate
This paper delves into the current status,characteristics,and causes of the economic disparity between northern and southern regions in China,with a focus on key questions.Firstly,it examines whether the regional economic development gap between northern and southern China has replaced the historical east-west disparity,becoming the primary driver of eco-nomic imbalance.Secondly,it explores the possibility of subdividing the northern and southern regions into various sub-regions,investigating whether economic disparities differ across sub-regions,time periods,and industries.Lastly,the study assesses changes in production factors,technological levels,and industrial structures between the two regions around 2013 and explores whether these changes have led to a sudden widening of the economic disparity.The contributions of this paper lie in three main aspects.Firstly,utilizing centroid analysis,the paper constructs an ana-lytical framework allowing for a comparable assessment of economic gaps between the north and south,as well as between the east and west.It introduces the concept of the"North-South Economic Equilibrium Line"to measure the dynamic develop-ment trends of the North-South economic disparity,providing analytical tools and visualization schemes for studying eco-nomic development balance.Secondly,the paper proposes an innovative economic growth contribution decomposition model.This model eliminates the impact of regional economic fundamentals and industrial scale on conventional statistical indica-tors,decomposing the overall economic disparity between the north and south at the industry or regional level.This helps elu-cidate the extent to which economic growth disparities in different regions and industries contribute to the overall economic gap.Lastly,the study establishes an economic growth framework driven by five factors:input factors,regional disparities,in-dustrial structures,innovation,and foreign trade.Through threshold analysis,the study examines whether these factors under-went a turning point around 2013 in driving economic development in the north and south,providing further insights into the causes of economic disparity.Research findings indicate that the economic disparity between the north and south expanded rapidly after 2013,slow-ing down by 2018 without evidence of convergence.This expansion has surpassed the historical east-west gap,becoming the primary driver of imbalances in China's regional economic development.The regional characteristics of this disparity are mainly attributed to the economic slowdown in the northern,especially the northeastern region,which can be divided into stages of spread from the northeast to other provinces and continuous economic slowdown in the northeast with differentiated development in other provinces.From an industrial perspective,the North-South economic disparity primarily stems from the rapid contraction of industry in the north,particularly in the northeast,which experienced a substantial slowdown in both the secondary and tertiary sectors after 2013.Factors influencing economic growth in the north include declining investment growth,labor outflows,and reduced contributions from human capital.The underlying reasons include a disproportionately high share of traditional industries,slow transformation,technological lags,and relatively weak international trade.This re-search advances academic understanding of the North-South economic disparity and provides valuable insights for policymak-ing in formulating scientifically grounded regional development strategies,promoting regional economic coordination,and achieving high-quality development.
North-South Economic DifferentiationEconomic Divide LineDecomposition of Growth Contribution
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