Abstract

China has been facing the dangerous dilemma of unbalanced regional development as the world does. With the coming of the two centenary goals, facing the peculiar difficulties and present conditions in Guizhou province, the central government of the People’s Republic of China made and implemented the catching-up strategy in Guizhou province in 2012. This paper regards implementing catching-up strategy in Guizhou province as a social quasi experiment, chooses 15 middle and western provinces or municipalities to compose control group, applies provincial panel data from 1998 to 2017, and uses synthetic control method to acquire a synthetic Guizhou province which is specified as a counterfactual condition of Guizhou after 2011 to study the economic effects of catching-up strategy quantitatively. The conclusion of positive econometric analysis indicates: from 2011 onward when implementing catching-up strategy, Guizhou Province’s growth rate of real GDP is higher than ‘the synthetic Guizhou’ by 1.4 percent to 3.4 percent. The paper asserts that in comparison with the universal strategy of regional development, practicing targeted catching-up strategy aiming at special region could realize surpassing speedily.

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