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The city-region has emerged as an important scale of state spatial strategy in China to promote equitable and sustainable development. This study investigates the spatial inequality of city-regions in the Yangtze River Valley (YRV) in terms of population, land, GDP and productivity, and examines changing patterns and factors of GDP per capita. We find that the spatial form of the YRV is typical of city-regions in China, where population density and productivity around mega-cities are much higher and decline from the low to the middle and upper reaches of the YRV. We also find that inequality across city-regions is high, and that most inequality is due to differences within city-regions. We find that the YRV is driven by capital-intensive and labour-intensive growth, with an emerging significance of productivity. Our analysis reveals the significance of institutional factors, including the processes of marketisation, globalisation, decentralisation and urbanisation in regional development. Moreover, the importance of the non-state sector in economic growth has been increasing, while the role of globalisation has been declining.

International evidence finds consistent equity concerns in quasi-marketised activation policies in terms of systematically worse experiences and outcomes for service users with greater support needs. However, equivalent risks around spatial inequalities are neglected within policy debates and empirical analyses. This article responds to that ongoing geographical gap through rich spatial analysis of the UK's Work Programme, a vanguard experiment in aggressively quasi-marketised employment activation policy. Findings show consistent evidence for spatial inequalities in outcomes patterned according to local economic deprivation, with more deprived local authorities losing out on millions of pounds compared to the per capita resourcing in wealthier areas.

Current understanding of spatial inequality in China is largely informed by the regional analysis framework (RAF). The RAF is built upon the proposition that the best geographical partition of the Chinese landmass for understanding spatial inequality is a partition into three supra-provincial regions: coastal, central and western. Empirical discussion revolves around how equal the three regions are along several different outcome measures (e.g. per capita income). However, a better framework for understanding spatial inequality is the one developed by Paul Krugman, the "manufacturing zones framework" (MZF), although this framework requires theoretical elaboration to encompass the Chinese reality in a realistic manner.

In this paper we calibrate two static computable general equilibrium (CGE) models with respectively 16 and 5,999 representative households. Aggregated and disaggregated household categories are consistently embedded in a 2000 social accounting matrix for Vietnam, mapping on a one-to-one basis to each other. Distinct differences in poverty assessments emerge when the impact of trade liberalization is analyzed in the two models. This highlights the importance of modeling micro household behavior and related income and expenditure distributions endogenously within a static CGE model framework. Our simulations indicate that poverty will rise following a revenue-neutral lowering of trade taxes. This is interpreted as a worst case scenario, which suggests that government should be proactive in combining trade liberalization measures with a pro-poor fiscal response to avoid increasing poverty in the short to medium term. – poverty ; trade liberalization ; general equilibrium models ; Vietnam