Spatio-temporal Analysis of China's Livelihood Development: Evidence from a Functional Index Model

As a vital element for achieving common prosperity and China's socialist modernization, exploring the time-varying disparities in the development of people's livelihood is of great significance to improve people's lives and promote balanced development. Essentially, livelihood development evolves continuously, yet discrete measurements of traditional time-series frameworks tend to lose some important information on the whole livelihood process resulting in difficulties in comprehensively portraying livelihood dynamics. To address this problem, we develop a functional China’s livelihood development index model leveraging the dynamic entropy weighting method. By employing the functional ANOVA, we test the significance of the disparities between regions in terms of static absolute levels and dynamic growth potentials. Furthermore, by applying the functional Theil index, we quantitatively trace the sources of disequilibrium in livelihood development from spatial and structural perspectives. The results show the following. (1) Economic development is the leading factor for the steady improvement of China’s livelihood, and the overall livelihood layout of China is "high in the east and low in the west"; (2) A significant regional imbalance exists only in the absolute level of China's livelihood development, but not in its velocity and acceleration; (3) At the national level, the disparities in the absolute level are mainly among regions; (4) At the regional level, the eastern is dominated by economic development inequality, while the central and the western have significant disparities in social development. This paper reveals the dynamic law of people's livelihood in a data-driven way, and provides guidance for balanced development of livelihoods and the achievement of common prosperity.