This paper employs time series techniques, with or without a structural break, to investigate the question of China's regional per capita income convergence. Our results suggest that China's regions, especially the eastern and the western regions, have converged to their own specific steady states over the past 40 years. The Gini coefficient, the ratio of per capita income between regions, and the coefficient of variation confirm our findings. We also identify the big shocks on the relative regional per capita income by allowing a time break. D 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

This paper uses a shift-share method to quantify the components of economic growth and structural changes in employment and investments at both the national and regional levels. The results indicate that rapid economic growth has been characterized by significant shifts in employment and investments between industries in China. Such structural changes have a distinct regional pattern which has important policy implications regarding spatial disparities in economic growth and income. The results shed some important light on the understanding of Deng's development thought that is formalized in this paper as a multi-tier and multi-stage development strategy for a large developing economy.

This paper presents a comprehensive picture of inequality in China on the basis of provincial data. It decomposes overall inequalities into intra and inter components. Rural-urban inequality dominated overall inequality in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Meanwhile, in recent years inter-regional inequality has grown rapidly and become an important component of inequality. We find that the pattern of inequality is quite different in the pre-reform and reform periods. Our results show that overall inequality in China is large by international standards and that it has grown worse during the past half century.

The existence of geo-economic clubs must meet two conditions. First, per capita output within each club converges to a long-term stationary state. Second, per capita output between clubs diverges so that the rich become richer and the poor poorer. This paper proposes a production model to explain club divergence and uses both the unit root test and the decomposition of an inequality index to prove the existence of geo-economic clubs among the Chinese provinces based on real per capita GDP data from 1952 to 1997. The results reflect a serious problem of regional inequality and growth divergence in contemporary China. J. Comp. Econ., September 2001, 29 (3), pp. 466-484. University of Middlesex, London NW4 4BT; and University of Chongqing, China.