A framework for economies classification and its application to China's regions.

International organizations approach economies classification differently. This investigation aims to explore a classification framework, named as thresholds of economy groupings, to obtain the thresholds for easily classifying economies. The framework is applied to classify provinces in mainland China, and the resulting thresholds provide instructional values reflecting macroeconomic situation. One result is that the average value of the relative gross domestic product per capita is roughly equal to the threshold between groupings 3 and 4 of five ones during 2009–2014, which implies regional disparities and balanced policy requirement in China. Furthermore, dynamic development tracks are described as different kinds of shapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]