关键词: 空间距离法, 区域人类发展指数, 聚类分析

Abstract: More and more scholars and policy institutions regard the Human Development Index (HDI) as a tool to monitor and analyze the implementation effects of regional policies. Because of the relativity of regional disparities and the HDI inherent defects, the application of HDI in the analysis of regional disparities must have inevitable limitations. Drawing on the core ideas of spatial distance method, this paper makes methodological improvements on the HDI and proposes Regional Human Development Index (RHDI). RHDI can calculate the objective gap of a region with the national minimum level and target level, which not only improves the technical quality of HDI, but also has accurate perspectives on regional imbalance and incoordination problems of human development in China. By empirical comparative analysis of HDI and RHDI, the paper gives a more accurate characterization for all the states and the gap of human development in different regions in China.

Key words: Spatial Distance Method, Regional Human Development Index, Cluster Analysis