Measuring Economic Growth Differentiation of Emerging Economies Based on Calculation of Theil Index

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to select 35 emerging economies from Asian, European, Latin American and African regions as the research objects and use GDP and population data of the years from 1990-2016 to calculate the intragroup Theil indexes within the four individual regions, the interblock Theil index among the four regions, the total Theil index among the emerging economies, then the contribution of intragroup and interblock gap to the total gap in order to measure the economic growth differentiation of the emerging economies. The results indicate that the decreasing total Theil index and the interblock Theil indexes reflect the narrowing trend of output per capita among the emerging economies and among the four regions, the intragroup Theil indexes within the four individual regions that are all lower than Asian region reflect that the gap of output per capita in the Asian region is larger than the other 3 regions; according to the contribution rate, the total gap of output per capita among the emerging economies is mainly affected by the gap among the four regions and the Asian region. It can be concluded that the economic growth differentiation is embodied mainly in the gap among the four regions and in the gap among the Asian economic economies.