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China’s inclusive development strategy and its effect on regional disparity

Abstract In 2004, the Chinese Government declared an inclusive development strategy, ‘building a harmonious society’. This paper focuses on regional disparity issues and discusses three questions: (1) What are the background, goals and main tasks of China’s inclusive development strategy? (2) What changes have taken place in China’s regional development strategy under this inclusive development strategy? and (3) What is the recent impact of the regional development strategy on regional disparity in China? Our analysis’ results show that after the late 1970s, China’s regional disparity experienced three sub-periods: a period of decline from 1978 to the early 1990s, a period of increase from the early 1990s to the early 2000s and a period of significant decline after the early 2000s. If we divide China’s overall regional disparity into four components: disparity within the east, disparity within the centre, disparity within the west and disparity between the three regions, the first and the fourth dominated the changes of China’s regional disparity in the past three decades. After the early 2000s, both the reduction of disparity between the three regions and the reduction of disparity within the east have contributed to the significant reduction of China’s overall regional disparity. This result implies that under the China-style inclusive development strategy, the recent adjustment in regional development strategy has considerably reduced the regional disparity in this huge country. However, the recent high economic growth in the inland provinces is heavily dependent on a huge input of capital, which is driven by public investment and seems not to be sustainable. To achieve a more inclusive and sustainable development, the Chinese Government and policy-makers should pay more attention to the issues of the low growth of TFP (total factor productivity) and the low growth of labour input in less-developed provinces.