Does digitalization mitigate regional inequalities?Evidence from China

Regional inequality significantly influences sustainable development and human well-being.In China,there exists pronounced regional disparities in economic and digital advancements;however,scant research delves into the interplay between them.By analyzing the economic development and digitalization gaps at regional and city levels in China,extending the original Cobb-Douglas production function,this study aims to evaluate the impact of digitalization on China's regional inequality using seemingly unrelated regression.The results indicate a greater emphasis on digital inequality compared to economic disparity,with variable coefficients of 0.59 for GDP per capita and 0.92 for the digitalization index over the past four years.However,GDP per capita demonstrates higher spatial concentration than digitalization.Notably,both disparities have shown a gradual reduction in recent years.The southeastern region of the Hu Huanyong Line exhibits superior levels and rates of economic and digital advancement in contrast to the northwestern region.While digitalization propels economic growth,it yields a nuanced impact on achieving balanced regional development,encompassing both positive and negative facets.Our study highlights that the marginal utility of advancing digitalization is more pronounced in less developed regions,but only if the government invests in the digital infrastructure and education in these areas.This study's methodology can be utilized for subsequent research,and our findings hold the potential to the government's regional investment and policy-making.

Regional Inequality of Higher Education in China and the Role of Unequal Economic Development

Over the past decade the scale of higher education in China has expanded substantially.Regional development policies have attempted to make use of scale expansion as a tool to reduce inequality of higher education among regions with different development levels by providing poor regions with preferential treatment and support.This paper analyzes a provincial dataset(1997-2008),aiming to provide comprehensive quantitative evidence for the development of inequality of opportunity in higher education across provinces in China over the period of scale expansion.Results show that,for higher education,regional inequality relative to provincial population size clearly decreased over the research period.Accompanying the reduction in overall inequality across provinces,inequality between poor and rich regions actually increased over the same period.However,the increase was realized in favor of the poor region.The empirical results are consistent with the policy orientation of reforming the higher education system and of promoting regional development in China over the past decade.

Regional Inequality of Higher Education Resources in China

With the expansion of the higher education system in China since the late 1990s,questions on the distribution of higher education opportunities and resources have attracted increasing attention from academics,policymakers,and the general public.While there have been an increasing studies on the development of higher education opportunity equality in China,quantitative,systematic research on the distribution of higher education resources across China is still rather limited.This paper aims at filling this gap.It provides quantitative and comprehensive evidence on the development of the distribution of higher education resources across Chinese provinces.The analysis is based on a provincial panel dataset and uses a generalized Theil index to measure inequality.Results show that higher education resources have been far from equally provided in relation to the size of provincial student populations in China.The unequal distribution has become even more pronounced over the past decade.In other words,even if high school students have an increasingly equal access to higher education in China(Bickenbach&Liu,2013b),the increasingly unequal distribution of higher education resources makes it difficult for university students to equally benefit from higher education.

Positional goods and the challenge of Chinese regional inequality

Scholars have focussed on income inequality as a major source of social instability.But the focus on crude income inequality has masked the deeper developmental problem facing many fast-growing economies.China is an extreme case of this issue inasmuch as its coastal regions can be viewed as comparable to middle income states,while the greater part of its rural and west-erm areas would be comparable to the poorer nations of the world.That means that the new middle class pays attention to issues such as pollution and status or positional goods than simple material goods.Construction costs of houses are in particular less than location.Other status goods are similar because they are not amenable to simple productivity improvement.This will make policies more difficult as conflict increases between those areas who are still eager for basic economic development and those richer areas whose wants and needs start to more closely resemble the preferences of richer developed countries.

China's Regional Disparity and Its Policy Responses

The fruits of China＇s rapid economic development over the 3 decades have not been distributed fairly across different regions. Using data from a sample of 815 Chinese listed firrns during 1998-2004, our error-correction investment model showes evidence of different financial constraints on firms＇ investment in different regions. We argue that China＇s regional development policies have contributed greatly to the regional inequalities. To control the rising inequality, China has shifted its focus from the coast to the interior regions. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the government to direct the economy, as market mechanisms now have afar greater influence on the economy than the government does. The people-centered approach of the current leadership has meant that substantial attention has been placed on regional development disparities in an attempt to build a ＂harmonious society. ＂ China needs further extensive reforms if all the measures for reducing regional disparity are to be effective.