Regional Disparities and Spatial Autocorrelation of Chinese Tertiary Industry

This paper aims to estimate the regional disparities and spatial autocorrelation of the tertiary industry development in China from a spatial econometric perspective. It delineates the trend of Chinese regional disparities and its spatial dynamics from 1998 to 2006 based on an exploratory spatial data analysis. The findings are as follows: (1) there exists an interregional inequality and weak correlations between provincial services industry development; (2) the spatial divergence between regional tertiary industries is significant and is going to increase in the short run. Then it examines the factors that contribute to the regional divergences of the tertiary industry development and puts forward several policy suggestions to narrow the regional gaps in the development of Chinese tertiary industry accordingly.