Abstract: This paper described the spatial-temporal evolvement characteristics of industrial productivity in Xinjiang, China at the county level by using the DEA and the ESDA. Based on panel data from 1998 to 2014,some conclusions are drawn as follows:(1) on average,the county-level industrial productivity of Xinjiang maintained steady growth,promoted by the common improvement of pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency,while the contribution share of technological change to the productivity growth was small;(2) the county-level average industrial productivity of Eastern Xinjiang,as well as that of Southern Xinjiang,showed catch-up growth when compared with Northern Xinjiang,implying that on average,the disparities in the county-level industrial productivity between the above three regions had lessened;(3) the counties of which the industrial productivity had improved, mainly distributed in the Belt on the Northern Slope of the Tianshan Mountains,and gradually converged in the north part of Northern Xinjiang,Eastern Xinjiang and the north and the southwest parts of Southern Xinjiang after 2007;at this point,the heterogeneity of the county-level industrial development in the NE-SW direction is not significant;(4) considering the overall spatial economic framework,the county-level industrial productivity of Xinjiang showed a statistically significant trend of spatial self-correlation,but the agglomeration level was low and existed fluctuation within a narrow range;the spatial structure of hotspot distribution has even shown a faint trend of spatial dispersion after 2011.(5) the number of hotspots remained relatively constant,while the agglomeration of hotspot location tended to vary from spatial continuity pattern to spatial discretization one,approximately forming a zonal region including those counties with higher industrial productivity in the NE-SW direction; the amount of cold spots has obviously decreased,and the corresponding counties were scattered in the poverty-stricken areas of Southern Xinjiang and the border and alpine area of Northern Xinjiang. There exists general growth among all of the counties of Xinjiang;as a result,the spatial heterogeneity of the county-level industry development has weakened.

Key words: county industry, total factor productivity, Malmquist index, exploratory spatial data analysis, spatial autocorrelation