Regional resilience in China: The response of the provinces to the growth slowdown

Since 2007 China’s real GDP growth rate has slowed from a level of over 10% per annum to below 7%. Given China’s regional diversity, an important aspect of the slowdown is the possible spatial variation in its experience. This is the issue we consider in this paper and we analyse this question in the context of the regional economic resilience framework. We proceed in two stages. In the first we analyse a measure of provincial slowdown (a sensitivity index) and of the variability of the slowdown based just on growth rates and examine the correlation of these measure with a number of commonly-used provincial characteristics. In the second stage we decompose regional growth rates into national and province-specific components using a VAR model and argue that since resilience concerns the response of provinces to a national shock, it is properly analysed using just the national component of the growth rate rather than the growth rate as such. We therefore analyse a sensitivity index and a variability index based just on the national component of growth and find that this extension is important both for ranking provinces according to resilience and for correlations of resilience with determinants capturing provincial characteristics. Generally we find that provinces close to the coast with new- rather than old-industry structures are less resilient and tended to suffered greater variability in growth during the slowdown.