Regional Differences and Spatial Evolutionary Characteristics of Common Prosperity of Rural Areas and Residents in China

Abstract

As the gap between urban and rural areas in China continues to widen, the government has proposed the goal of bringing common prosperity to rural areas and residents according to Marxist humanitarian ideals. The common prosperity proposed by China is the overall prosperity of material and spiritual life. This study constructs a comprehensive index system to measure and evaluate the level of common prosperity of rural areas and residents in 30 provinces in China using the combined methods of entropy and principal component analysis. The data covered the national and provincial levels. Furthermore, this study uses the natural break and Terrell index decomposition methods to comprehensively evaluate the level of common prosperity of rural areas and residents in the seven major economic regions of China in 2020. To demonstrate the changing trends, this study analyses the dynamic evolution process and regional disparities in the common prosperity of rural areas and residents from 2011 to 2020. Using spatial econometric analyses, this study explores the overall clustering trends of the common prosperity of rural areas and residents in seven major economic regions in China. The results show that the overall level of common prosperity of rural areas and residents is rising at the national level; however, marked differences between provinces remain. Inequality between rural Chinese areas and rural residents is more acute in less economically developed regions. The problem is shifting from interregional to intraregional inequality, with obvious spatial differences. There is a clear positive spatial autocorrelation among most provinces in the seven economic regions and a significant spatial spillover effect in the Yangtze River Delta region.