(Yicai Global) May 21 -- Guangdong, the Chinese province with the biggest economy, ranked seventh among the country’s provinces last year in terms of economic output per head and was held back by an uneven spread across the province, according to Yicai Global calculations.

Per capita gross domestic product in the southern economic powerhouse was CNY87,897 (USD16,600) last year, according to the latest statistics. Guangdong's top-ranking city was hi-tech hub Shenzhen, with per capita GDP of CNY157,575 (USD24,500). Zhuhai, which borders Macao, came second at CNY142,727, followed by Guangzhou and Foshan which also scored above CNY100,000.

Zhuhai might have come second, but due to its small population it cannot compete with Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan and Foshan in terms of economic aggregate, Zheng Yujie, director of the Research and Information Department at the China Development Institute, told Yicai Global.

Imbalanced regional development is a big issue, the calculations showed. Out of Guangdong’s 21 administrative regions, just six cities had per-capita GDP of over CNY70,000, all of which are in the Pearl River Delta, a densely urbanized coastal area that encompasses Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan and several other major municipalities as well as the special administrative regions Hong Kong and Macao. Three even logged per capita GDP of under CNY40,000 (USD6,218).

“The eastern, western and northern parts of Guangdong are mountainous and are not developing well in comparison to the Pearl River Delta,” said Peng Peng, executive president of the Guangdong Institutional Reform Research Association. “One important reason is that the Pearl River Delta region is absorbing much of the resources such as funds, technologies and talent.”

The population in the Pearl River Delta swelled 8 percentage points last year from a decade earlier, while that along the province’s coastal economic belt dropped by 3.16 percentage points, according to the Guangdong Province Bureau of Statistics. There were corresponding falls in the provinces’ west and northern regions at 2.1 and 2.78 percentage points, respectively.

Meizhou in the northeast, which ranked last with per capita GDP of just CNY31,188 (USD4,850), saw its population shrivel by 8.65 percent from 2010.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor