Just a minor nit on the provinces, you excluded Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai which have province level status and almost 60 million in population combined, close to Thailand's 70 million, and a weighted average HDI of 0.87.

Heterogeneity is and perhaps will always be a thing for China, and part of the question is if the poor parts have any low hanging fruit left to mimic the success of the earlier-developed and now high HDI areas, or have those fruit withered by now.

Good catch!

I left Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin out due to the fact that they are governed differently than provinces, as they are under direct administration of the State Council and they are almost 100% urban. This makes them a bad comparison with Thailand as a whole. At a micro level, it might be interesting to compare BKK versus Beijing/Shanghai/Tianjin but Thailand allows free movement and domiciling, so it's not a great comparison.

> the question is if the poor parts have any low hanging fruit left to mimic the success of the earlier-developed and now high HDI areas, or have those fruit withered by now

It's a tough question and depends province to province. The provinces around Manchuria are probably all tapped out, but there might be some opportunity left in Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guangxi, but local and mid-level governance in China (like other middle income countries) sucks.

I have written a lot about this in a previous life, but I'd rather not write a whole Econometrics white paper on HN

True! This is well outside of the original point, but Beijing and Tianjin are interesting cases and perhaps useful for regional aggregates because they are essentially black holes that have taken GDP and capital out of their surrounding areas, explaining some portion of the neighboring provinces' underperformance. Kind of like how New York state would look very different without New York City maybe?

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/04/16/523632920/...

Exactly!

This can be seen first hand with Beijing+Tianjin versus Hebei.

Those 2 cities were under direct State Council control so it was easier to push economic reforms versus a largely rural province like Hebei, plus they were close enough that it made sense for anyone half ambitious in Hebei to leave for the big city than to stay back.

This is what happened in NY State as well with NYC and IL with Chicago. It's called primacy effect in economics.

It would be interesting to compare Beijing+Hebei to Shanghai+Zhejiang+Jiangsu. I believe the primate effect works the same way, but Hebei is significantly poorer most likely due to Beijing getting too many preference in policy making. (e.g. to mitigate the air pollution in Beijing let's shutdown factories in surrounding area)

There's been some research into this in China (comparative development was in fact the late Lee Kequiang's speciality).

The issue is, research into stuff like this and converting it into actionable policy is becoming difficult, as mid and lower level civil servants don't want to deviate from a literal definition of policies or their mandate as administrations have become much more vindictive due to the economic slowdown. Research like this ends up stepping on people's toes.

http://www.kjjb.org/EN/abstract/abstract18771.shtml

http://www.progressingeography.com/EN/10.18306/dlkxjz.2019.0...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705092...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648...

Where can I read more of your writings about China? You seem to have quite nuanced knowledge on the topic.

In the archives of a respectable Econ and PoliSci department and Outlook Archives on the Hill from at most a decade ago. I left that space to return to Tech PM and Entrepreneurship because I also studied CS, nerded out about technology strategy, and didn't have a trust fund to afford DC on a staffer's salary.