Under the new development pattern, exploring the regional differences and spatio-temporal evolution of provincial foreign trade competitiveness has far-reaching significance for promoting regional coordination and foreign trade development. Therefore, this paper establishes a comprehensive evaluation system for provincial foreign trade competitiveness in China and uses entropy method, Dagum Gini coefficient and other methods to study the provincial foreign trade competitiveness of 30 provinces in China from 2013 to 2021. It is found that the overall competitiveness of foreign trade is constantly improving, but the inter-provincial gap is still large, and the "Matthew effect" is significant. The differences mainly come from three regions, of which the gap between the eastern and western regions is the largest, while the gap between the central and western regions is the smallest; within the eastern, central, and western regions, there is a situation where the central areas lead the development of foreign trade in other areas; there is a slight polarization phenomenon in the foreign trade competitiveness within the eastern and western regions. Provincial foreign trade competitiveness exhibits positive spatial correlation, with low-level agglomeration being predominant.
