Abstract: Ecological land rent is an important indicator to measure the social-economic effect of resource scarcity. Based on the assessment data of ecological land rent in per unit economy output and total ecological land rent in China in the years 2002 and 2007, this paper analyzed the spatial difference of ecological land rent with the help of softwares of ArcGIS and GeoDA. And then, it examined the influencing factors of spatial difference of ecological land rent with the method of traditional regression analysis and spatial correlation analysis. The results can be obtained as follows. Firstly, in the research period, ecological land rent in per unit economy output was low in Southwest and Northeast China, while high in Hebei and Henan provinces, presenting a steady situation. The ecological land rent in per unit economy output had an increasing tendency in western and central China and a decreasing one in eastern China. In general, the spatial distribution of ecological land rent in per unit economy output in China was scattered. Secondly, the total ecological land rent of China had significant spatial aggregation in general, and spatial difference characteristics between eastern, central and western China. Accordingly, there were the high-high and low-low clustering regions in terms of spatial distribution of the total ecological land rent. The Bohai Rim, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta were the highly clustering region of the total ecological land rent, and western China had very low ecological land rent in total amount. Thirdly, spatial difference of ecological land rent in China was affected by factors such as population growth, economic development, industrial structure and so on. There was a significant positive spatial correlation between population density, urbanization level, economy density, per capita consuming level, GDP per capita and ecological land rent, which indicates there is spatial clustering between ecological land rent and other factors. But there was a negative correlation between ecological land rent and agricultural output percentage, which shows there is spatial scattering between ecological land rent and agricultural output percentage.

Key words: ecological land rent, spatial difference, influencing factors, Global Moran’s I, China