Analyzing regional economic disparities based on ESDA in Yangtze River Delta, China

The economic growth in each region not only depends on its own characteristics, but also on those close to the region. This paper introduces ESDA(Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis) into analyzing regional economic disparities. By means of global and local spatial autocorrelation analyses, this paper then investigates the spatial dynamics of regional disparities at the city level in Yangtze River Delta by analyzing per capita GDP data, 2001-2011. Experiments show that the level of economic development of the cities in the Yangtze River Delta showed strong spatial autocorrelation as a whole spatial pattern, with similar regions gathering in space distribution and the trend is increasing gradually. But the economy disparity of cities far away is still large, especially Shanghai and the cities in southern or northern Jiangsu or southern Zhejiang.