The research on the distribution of rural buildings is one of the fundamental works of urban-rural development in Vietnam. Adopting Mask R-CNN deep learning framework and collecting sub-meter remote sensing images, this research used a remote sensing interpretation model of rural buildings trained based on East Asian characteristics of rural buildings and successfully recognized about 2.87 million rural buildings in 34 Vietnamese provincial administrative districts with a total area of rural buildings of 2,492 million square meters. The reliability of the identification results was verified by manual detection and quantitative statistics, and a multi-scale database of rural buildings in Vietnam based on individual rural buildings was created. Based on the database, this paper analyzes the distribution characteristics of rural buildings and summarizes characteristics of rural buildings distribution at the country, regional, and provincial scales. The identification results lay the foundation for the next study of urban-rural relations in Southeast Asia and the construction of a basic database on villages.

This study analyses regional development in one of the poorest provinces in China, Guizhou Province, between 2000 and 2012 using a multiscale and multi-mechanism framework. In general, regional inequality has been declining since 2000. In addition, economic development in Guizhou Province presented spatial agglomeration and club convergence, which shows how the development pattern of one core area, two-wing areas and a contiguous area at the edge of the province have been developed between 2006 and 2012. Multilevel regression analysis revealed that industrialization and investment level were the primary driving forces of regional economic disparity in Guizhou Province. The influences of marketization and decentralization on regional economic disparity were relatively weak. Investment level reinforced regional economic disparity and the development of core-periphery structure in the province. However, investment level actually weakened the regional economic disparity in Guizhou Province when the variable of time was considered. In addition, both the topography and urban–rural differentiation were the two main reasons for forming a core-periphery structure in Guizhou Province.