New Evidence of Convergence Across Chinese Provinces
中国省际经济趋同的定量分析

This paper is based on the well known conditional convergence model of Barro and Sala I Martin (1995) and an article by Coulombe S. (New Evidence of Convergence Across Canadian Provinces: the Role of Urbanization) to examine the relative evolution of per capita GDP across 30 provinces in China from 1978 to 1999. This paper selects the ratio between the employment ratio of secondary and tertiary industries of the provinces and that of nation to represent the relative steady state. As a result, empirical results show differences from opinions of other papers in such aspects as convergent speed and convergent model, etc.. Empirical results indicate that economic growth among the provinces has converged at a speed of about 4.5% per year. Most of the coastal regions in China appear to be in the neighborhoods of their respective steady states in 1999. While the other provinces have been vibrating under or in the neighborhoods of their respective steady states since 1978, the deviation from their respective steady states is bigger than that of coastal regions. This paper finds that the impact of prior advantage to its relative steady state value is about 0 618. This paper also calculates the evolution of respective steady state. The analysis indicates that in the period of the study, the industrialization, market economic mechanism, foreign capital ,advanced technology, economic location, and etc, play an important role in the course of the economy growth. So in making progress, we should pay attention to those factors. The analysis also echoes the timing of carrying out the "big development" of western region in china.