TY - JOUR
T1 - Quantifying China's regional economic complexity
AU - Gao, Jian
AU - Zhou, Tao
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for critical comments and constructive suggestions. The authors thank Haixing Dai, Yiding Liu, Zhihai Rong, Qing Wang, and Dan Yang for helpful discussions. This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61433014 and 61673086 ). Jian Gao acknowledges the China Scholarship Council for partial financial support and the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab for hosting.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2018/2/15
Y1 - 2018/2/15
N2 - China has experienced an outstanding economic expansion during the past decades, however, literature on non-monetary metrics that reveal the status of China's regional economic development are still lacking. In this paper, we fill this gap by quantifying the economic complexity of China's provinces through analyzing 25 years’ firm data. First, we estimate the regional economic complexity index (ECI), and show that the overall time evolution of provinces’ ECI is relatively stable and slow. Then, after linking ECI to the economic development and the income inequality, we find that the explanatory power of ECI is positive for the former but negative for the latter. Next, we compare different measures of economic diversity and explore their relationships with monetary macroeconomic indicators. Results show that the ECI index and the non-linear iteration based Fitness index are comparative, and they both have stronger explanatory power than other benchmark measures. Further multivariate regressions suggest the robustness of our results after controlling other socioeconomic factors. Our work moves forward a step towards better understanding China's regional economic development and non-monetary macroeconomic indicators.
AB - China has experienced an outstanding economic expansion during the past decades, however, literature on non-monetary metrics that reveal the status of China's regional economic development are still lacking. In this paper, we fill this gap by quantifying the economic complexity of China's provinces through analyzing 25 years’ firm data. First, we estimate the regional economic complexity index (ECI), and show that the overall time evolution of provinces’ ECI is relatively stable and slow. Then, after linking ECI to the economic development and the income inequality, we find that the explanatory power of ECI is positive for the former but negative for the latter. Next, we compare different measures of economic diversity and explore their relationships with monetary macroeconomic indicators. Results show that the ECI index and the non-linear iteration based Fitness index are comparative, and they both have stronger explanatory power than other benchmark measures. Further multivariate regressions suggest the robustness of our results after controlling other socioeconomic factors. Our work moves forward a step towards better understanding China's regional economic development and non-monetary macroeconomic indicators.
KW - Economic complexity
KW - Economic development
KW - Entropy
KW - Network science
KW - Non-linear science
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U2 - 10.1016/j.physa.2017.11.084
DO - 10.1016/j.physa.2017.11.084
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85034865300
SN - 0378-4371
VL - 492
SP - 1591
EP - 1603
JO - Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
JF - Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
ER -
