| Description |
China's reform and transition have dramatically accelerated the socioeconomic development in the last three decades. At the same time, the unequal distributions of wealth and social resources have been intensified. China's regional inequality has attracted more attention from both policy makers and researchers. The central government has listed "reducing regional inequality" as one important goal of national development. This dissertation research intends to quantify China's regional development during the reform era by detecting the multiscale variation of regional inequality, examining the spatial-temporal hierarchy and influence of multimechanisms, and exploring one consequence of regional economic disparity. First, this project investigates China's regional economic inequality from 1978 to 2007. I analyze the multiscalar spatial patterns of economic disparities with Coefficient of Variation (CV), Gini Coefficient, and Theil Index, and explore the spatial-temporal hierarchy of multimechanisms and their specific influences on regional economy through multilevel modeling. The results reveal the significant role of municipalities for shaping the spatial-temporal variation of China's economic development, and indicate the sensitivity of regional inequality to spatial scale. The analysis also illustrates that globalization has become the prominent mechanism of China's development in the recent decade. Second, this study examines health care and health inequalities as an important consequence of an unbalanced regional economy. I apply Geographic Information System (GIS)-based spatial statistical methods such as Coefficient of Variation and Moran's I to detect spatial-temporal patterns of health care, and use multilevel regression to examine the linkages between health care, mortality, and regional economic inequality. The analysis reveals that health care inequality is also sensitive to geographic scale, and demonstrates that the concurrent transitions of decentralization, marketization, globalization, and urbanization in China have interactively contributed to health care inequality and mortality. Third, this research conducts a case study in a less investigated agricultureoriented interior province, Henan Province. Such statistical and GIS methods as CV, Getis-Ord Gi*, and geographically weighted regression (GWR) are used to explore the disparities in economic development and health care level as well as to examine the effects of multiple transitions. The results uncover the significant core-periphery and urban-rural gaps in both economy and health care level. |
