The study of regional inequality has attracted numerous attentions of geographers and economists. The interdisciplinary research has been reflected in a spatial-temporal hierarchical structure, that is, the multi-scalar nature of economic convergence and the temporal dynamics of geographical inequality. With the support of big databases, the integration of these two growing fields provides opportunities for a spatially integrated social science. Therefore, this paper aims to explore this long-debated issue from two novel perspectives. On the one hand, the newly available county-level dataset will be employed to reexamine the three major issues of economic inequality and then a comparative analysis at the county level, city level and provincial level will be conducted to study the scale nature of economic inequality. On the other hand, the spatial data exploratory analysis as well as the geospatial analysis provides a new methodological framework to study the spatial effects of economic development. Three major research issues regarding to the temporal trend, global and local spatial pattern and the multi-scalar mechanisms of regional inequality have been reexamined at three different spatial scales using the geospatial analysis.

The study of regional inequality has attracted numerous attentions of geographers and economists. The interdisciplinary research has been reflected in a spatial-temporal hierarchical structure, that is, the multi-scalar nature of economic convergence and the temporal dynamics of geographical inequality. With the support of big databases, the integration of these two growing fields provides opportunities for a spatially integrated social science. Therefore, this paper aims to explore this long-debated issue from two novel perspectives. On the one hand, the newly available county-level dataset will be employed to reexamine the three major issues of economic inequality and then a comparative analysis at the county level, city level and provincial level will be conducted to study the scale nature of economic inequality. On the other hand, the spatial data exploratory analysis as well as the geospatial analysis provides a new methodological framework to study the spatial effects of economic development. Three major research issues regarding to the temporal trend, global and local spatial pattern and the multi-scalar mechanisms of regional inequality have been reexamined at three different spatial scales using the geospatial analysis.（AI翻译）