Abstract: In order to research the regional imbalance and heterogeneity of China’s high-quality economic development, this paper established an economic development quality index and combined with Dagum Gini Coefficient and Stochastic Kernel Estimation based on China ’s New Development Principles. The results show that: (1) The quality of China ’s economic development continues to improve, and the main reason for the regional imbalance lies in the heterogeneity among regions; (2) The high-quality economic development level presents the club convergence effect and its spatial distribution pattern has obvious path dependence characteristics. In addition, there are trickle-down effects and osmotic effects in high-level club regions; (3) From the perspective of each sub-dimension, the regional imbalance and spatial characteristic of high-quality economic development is mainly reflected in the three dimensions of innovation, openness and sharing. In order to reduce regional imbalance, we should focus on innovation, opening and sharing. In the future, regional imbalance may still be the main formation of China’s economic space layout, but the existence of these spatial effects may become an important breakthrough to promote the coordination and balanced development of regional economy. Therefore, the government should combine the trickle-down effect and osmotic effect of high-level regions to focus on regulating the coordinated development of various regions in innovation, openness and sharing, strengthen coordination and cooperation between different geographical regions, expand the regional scope of growth poles, and realize economies of scale and agglomeration of higher magnitude.
Key words: high-quality economic development; China’s New Development Principles; regional heterogeneity;club convergence