Fifty Years of Regional Inequality in China: A Journey through Central Planning, Reform, and Openness

By Ravi Kanbur, Xiaobo Zhang. 2005

809 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The paper constructs and analyzes a long-run time series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, and finally the period of openness and global integration in the late 1990s. Econometric analysis establishes that regional inequality is explained in the different phases by three key policy variables—the ratio of heavy industry to gross output value, the degree of decentralization, and the degree of openness.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7d5c1b562773da13afdae98578c974ea8e58be67

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Citations in the corpus

The spatial effects of trade openness: a survey (2011, background): “In China, trade appears to have disproportionately favoured the already-richer coastal regions (Kanbur and Zhang 2005).”
Estimating Income Inequality in China Using Grouped Data and the Generalized Beta Distribution (2007, background): “For example, Kanbur and Zhang (2005) show a Gini coefficient of 0.303 for China for the year 1999.”
Agglomeration and productivity: Firm-level evidence from China's textile industry (2011, background): “experience the development of widened regional inequality (Fleisher and Chen, 1997; Kankur and Zhang, 1999).”
‘No county left behind?’ The distributional impact of high-speed rail upgrades in China (2016, neutral): “In addition, this paper also provides useful insights in understanding the increasing rural-urban disparity in China in the past few decades, where urban biased infrastructure investment may have played a role (Kanbur and Zhang, 2005; Xu, 2011).”
China’s Regional Disparities: Experience and Policy (2011, neutral): “4 In Kanbur and Zhang (2005), an econometric analysis was conducted to establish the relationship between economic policies and observed regional inequality patterns up to 2000.”
Income Inequality in Rural China: Regression-based Decomposition Using Household Data (2005, neutral): “Except Kanbur and Zhang (1999, 2005), most of the published works only provide a snapshot, without a time profile.”
Regional Inequality and Decentralization: An Empirical Analysis (2012, neutral): “Single-country studies are provided by Kim et al (2003) for Korea; Kanbur and Zhang (2005) and Qiao et al (2008) for China; Silva (2005) for the Philippines; Bonet (2006) for Colombia; Akai and Hosio (2009) for the United States; and Calamai (2009) for Italy.”