Abstract: To build the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has already become the state development strategy, indicating a new stage of the cooperation among the three places-Guangdong, Hong Kong and Marco. At the same time, the Greater Bay Area has raised the increasing interests of researchers in the fields of all kinds. The existing studies on the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area have been done qualitatively, mainly focusing on the functions, regional relationship and development strategies, while there lacks the research on the regional economy and its spatiotemporal evolutionary structure. In this paper, some quantitative methods have been applied to study the spatiotemporal evolutionary characteristics of the economic development in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. First, a comprehensive economic indicator system was established based on the relevant data of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area from 1995 to 2015. By means of the Entropy Evaluation Method, the entropy of each indicator was determined. With the comprehensive assessment model of economic development, the level of economy in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area was calculated. Secondly, the paper used relative development rate (Nich), standard deviation, variable coefficient as well as Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis to analyze the spatiotemporal evolutionary characteristics of the economy in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area since 1995. Finally, the paper explored the possible influencing factors on the economic development in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. The results show that: 1) the economy developed rapidly with some fluctuations as a whole which can be divided into four stages according to its growth rate. Besides, the gross economy has increased and it developed an exported-oriented economy. However, the adjustment of industrial structure was slow. During the study period, Hong Kong and Macao experienced the highest growth rate followed by Guangzhou and Shenzhen, who have already ranked at the first level in the Bay Area; 2) the absolute disparity increased, in the contrary, the relative disparity decreased. Besides, the polarization of economy first experienced a downward trend but then it was strengthened; 3) the spatial characteristic of economy changed from polar central structure composed of Hong Kong and Macao to multi-central structure with Guangzhou and Shenzhen standing out besides Hong Kong and Macao, a reversed “U” type can be seen in the trend analysis; 4) external environment, location and regional policies turned out to be the main influencing factors on the spatiotemporal characteristics of regional economy. After 21 years’ development, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has changed its economic structure from a core-periphery to a network, which indicated the increase of the connection among the cities. In order to improve the international competition of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, this paper gave suggestions from the perspectives of industrial transformation, ecological protection, regional cooperation, cultural innovation and so forth.

Key words: economic development, regional development strategy, external environment, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area