  China has experienced an outstanding economic expansion during the past
decades, however, literature on non-monetary metrics that reveal the status of
China's regional economic development are still lacking. In this paper, we fill
this gap by quantifying the economic complexity of China's provinces through
analyzing 25 years' firm data. First, we estimate the regional economic
complexity index (ECI), and show that the overall time evolution of provinces'
ECI is relatively stable and slow. Then, after linking ECI to the economic
development and the income inequality, we find that the explanatory power of
ECI is positive for the former but negative for the latter. Next, we compare
different measures of economic diversity and explore their relationships with
monetary macroeconomic indicators. Results show that the ECI index and the
non-linear iteration based Fitness index are comparative, and they both have
stronger explanatory power than other benchmark measures. Further multivariate
regressions suggest the robustness of our results after controlling other
socioeconomic factors. Our work moves forward a step towards better
understanding China's regional economic development and non-monetary
macroeconomic indicators.
