Multidimensional Measurement and Spatiotemporal Evolution of Regional Development Imbalance in China

Unbalanced regional development is a long-standing spatial feature of China. Most extant studies are restricted to a single economic dimension and lack long-run comprehensive analysis that couples the economic, social and ecological dimensions. Drawing on China’s provincial panel data from 1990 to 2023, this paper constructs a comprehensive indicator system across three dimensions, measures comprehensive development levels with the entropy-weight TOPSIS method, and decomposes the overall imbalance into within-region disparity, between-region net disparity and the intensity of transvariation with the Dagum Gini coefficient, revealing the spatiotemporal evolution of imbalance across the four major zones of Southeast, Central, Western and Northeast China. The results show that the three types of imbalance are not synchronized: economic imbalance first rose and then declined, social imbalance fluctuated more strongly, and ecological imbalance changed mildly. The distribution of intra-provincial social and ecological disparities across zones is markedly crossed, whereas the cross-zone overlap of economic disparities has continuously weakened since 2000, and the gradient has become clear again. Accordingly, this paper proposes policy recommendations including three-dimensional assessment, classified governance, industrial collaboration and ecological compensation. This study enriches the multidimensional measurement paradigm of regional imbalance and provides quantitative support for coordinating innovation resources and promoting coordinated regional development.