Abstract: Since such characteristics as high-middle speed, optimal structure, new power etc., have become the new normality in the development of China’s economic reform, to improve the quantity of economic growth has become an important problem to be solved urgently during the economic development. This paper adopts the method of principal component analysis to measure the index value of economic growth quality of China’s 30 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) from 1998 to 2012. And it employs the semi-parametric model for heterogeneity over time and across individuals to check the regional disparities of the quality of economic growth. The result shows that there is a tendency of convergence of China’s economic growth quality from 1998 to 2012; the horizontal convergence hypothesis for the regional quality disparities in economic growth is rejected, and the growth rate converges with the time. The result of the regional re-checking shows that the quality disparity of economic growth of the two groups of the central region and the western region presents a tendency of conditional convergence, while that of the eastern region presents a tendency of divergency. It is also found through further check with the clustering method that the level of economic growth quality of all the 30 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) has a convergence club.

Key words: quality of economic growth; regional disparity; semi-parametric model for heterogeneity over time and across individuals