Abstract: Taking the data of China’s 31 provinces from 1978 to 2008 as the sample and the financial relative ratios as the index, this article empirically studies the spatial inequality characteristics and the polarization of China’s financial development. It is found that the visualization approach of GIS (Geographic Information System) can directly indicate that China’s financial development has significant spatial inequality characteristics. The Gini coefficient measurement and it’s decomposition show that the overall disparity of the spatial distribution of China’s financial development presents an extending trend, of which the disparity between the regions are the major source of the regional differences of China’s financial development during the sample investigation period. The result of the financial development polarization degree measurement shows that during the sample period the spatial polarization degree of China’s financial development presents a significant increasing trend. The continuous rising of the polymerization degree within regions and the confronting strength between regions becomes the main source of the rising polymerization degree of the financial development.

Key words: financial development; GIS; spatial inequality; Gini coefficient; polarization index