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Is spatial distribution of China’s population excessively unequal? A cross-country comparison

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Abstract

This study explores whether China’s population distribution is excessively biased toward large cities or coastal regions. The test is based on a fixed effects model estimated from a 5-year panel dataset for 101 countries, and two spatial inequality measures are computed from \(0.25^{\circ }\times 0.25^{\circ }\) population grids for a parallel cross-country comparison. The results show that the spatial Gini coefficient for China does not deviate from a general trend, while Moran’s I index is biased upward. This suggests that the spatial inequality of China’s population distribution tends to be more obvious at the regional level than at the city level.

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Source: Created by the author from China’s official census data

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Source: Created from NBSC (2015) and U.S. Census Bureau (2017)

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and Brandon C. W. Hung and Kenneth K. H. Wong for their excellent research assistance. This study was supported by a University of Hong Kong internal grant attached to the 2015 Faculty of Architecture Research Output Prize.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Urban Planning and Design, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, SAR, China

    Kyung-Min Nam

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  1. Kyung-Min Nam
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Correspondence to Kyung-Min Nam.

Appendix

Appendix

The full list of fixed effects estimates (country-specific systemic biases in spatial Gini and Moran’s I) is given in Table 7.

Table 7 Country fixed effects estimates from Models 1b and 2b (global mean = 0)
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Nam, KM. Is spatial distribution of China’s population excessively unequal? A cross-country comparison. Ann Reg Sci 59, 453–474 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-017-0839-0

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