A dissection of the growth of regional disparities in Chinese labor productivity between 1997 and 2002

This paper quantifies the effects of some proximate causes for the regional productivity disparities of China in 1997 and their growth in the five years thereafter. A novel shift-share approach based on input–output data is used to divide the regional differences, so that explicit attention is paid to the regional consequences of China’s specific role in global production networks (with a focus on sectoral value added coefficients). In the process, a new method is proposed to deflate the data in constant prices. The results show that regions with high labor productivity levels in 1997 generally experienced increases of the employment shares in sectors with high productivity levels. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014