Spatial analysis of economic growth convergence mechanism in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region
京津冀都市圈经济增长收敛机制的空间分析

The question of regional convergence is of great interest to regional scientists,but the majority of empirical studies of regional convergence in literature have been focused on the traditional convergence methods in which the geographic entities are treated as "isolated islands" and have not explicitly considered the regional spatial dependence.In this paper,methods of exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial autocorrelation model provide new insights to explore spatial dependence relation of BeijingTianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region over the 1992~2003 period.Furthermore,using spatial econometrics,income convergence was computed by using three different models,which are spatial lag model,spatial error model and traditional convergence model.Some results are drawn as follows: (1) Spatial dependence plays an important role in analyzing regional income convergence.The application of exploratory spatial data analysis methods revealed strong evidence for spatial dependence of regional economic growth and improved traditional convergence model.(2) The specification of traditional convergence model is misspecification due to ignoring spatial dependence.Spatial lag model and spatial error model,which take spatial lagged dependent variables and spatial lagged error terms into account based on traditional convergence model, optimize the structure of model,and give helpful hints of the meaning of convergent economy-policy.(3) A spatial analysis of Moran scatter plot of GDP per capita indicates that economic growth is also highly spatial dependence in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region between 1992 and 2003,namely,a high income county with high income neighbors and a low income county surrounded by low income neighbors.(4) Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region converges to a specific steady-state in GDP per capita from 1992 to 2003.At the same time,Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region is the phase of polarization and economic disparity is big,the rate of convergence is small.