What Difference Do Polarisation Measures Make? An Application to China

By Xiaobo Zhang, Ravi Kanbur. Journal of Development Studies, 2001

324 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years there has been much discussion of the difference between inequality and polarisation. The vast literature on inequality is held to miss out key features of distributional change, which are better described as changes in polarisation. Axioms have been proposed which capture some of these differences, and measures of polarisation, as distinct from inequality, have been suggested. The theoretical distinctions proposed in this literature are indeed interesting. But do the newly proposed measures of polarisation give different results in comparing societies over time? We address these questions for China, where dramatic increases in inequality and polarisation have been much discussed in the literature. We find that, contrary to theoretical expectation, the new measures of polarisation do not generate very different results from the standard measures of inequality. The paper ends by considering a different approach to polarisation which might better conform to the policy concerns expressed in the specific context of China.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4f8b1b07e7092ce5b6916bd2574d6afb32d5795

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Citations in the corpus

Economics and Violent Conflict (2003, background): “30 Horizontal inequality can be measured by the share of total inequality that is captured by “between group” rather than within group inequality (this for example has been proposed by Zhang and Kanbur (2001) as a measure of polarization).”
Irevisiting The Greed And Grievance Explanations For Violent Internal Conflict (2009, background): “Another polarisation measure is proposed by Zhang and Kanbur (2001) .”
An Extension of a Measure of Polarization, with an application to the income distribution of five OECD countries (2007, background): “different contexts; see, for instance, Wang and Tsui [15], Zhang and Kanbur [ 17 ], Chakravarty and Majumder [4, 5], Salas and Rodriguez [14], Anderson [1, 2] and Montalvo and Reynal-Querol [12].”
Water management and crop production for food security in China: A review (2009, background): “The implications of over-pumping include higher pumping costs, wasteful energy use, salt water intrusion, increased soil salinity and waterlogging, soil compaction, and land subsidence (Zhen and Routray, 2002).”
Measuring regional inequality of education in China: widening coast-inland gap or widening rural-urban gap? (2008, methodology): “An alternative measure of educational inequality is a polarisation index, as defined by Zhang and Kanbur (2001): P = Between-group inequality/Within-group inequality (5) Instead of decomposing the Gini index to reveal the contributions of different groupings to overall educational disparities, this…”
China’s Regional Disparities: Experience and Policy (2011, unknown): “Another key dimension of inequality in China, especially in the post-reform period, is that between inland and coastal provinces (Chen and Fleisher, 1996; and Zhang and Kanbur, 2001).”
FIFTY YEARS OF REGIONAL INEQUALITY IN CHINA: A JOURNEY THROUGH REVOLUTION, REFORM AND OPENNESS (2001, background): “Zhang and Kanbur (2001) define the polarisation index as: P=between-group inequality/within-group inequality (3) where between-group inequality and within-group inequality are defined in (2).”
Constructing indices of multivariate polarization (2009, background): “For example, the measure PZ K proposed in Zhang and Kanbur [28] is given by the ratio of income inequality between and inequality within groups, like the measure P1 in Eq.”
Performance Management, High-Powered Incentives, and Environmental Policies in China (2015, background): “…Vol. 18, No. 3, 2015 peer-reviewed journals across disciplines, for example, economics (e.g., Jefferson et al. 2000; Jian, Sachs, and Warner 1996; Zhang and Kanbur 2001), environmental science and studies (e.g., Cao, Zhang, and Zheng 2006; Fan, Liao, and Wei 2007; Hao and Wang 2005; Kambara…”
Spatial Analysis of Regional Income Inequality (2001, background): “This is similar to the polarization index recently suggested by Zhang and Kanbur (2001): P T B T W (12) Unfortunately, neither of these studies developed an inferential basis against which the measures could be evaluated, and instead used their measure in a descriptive fashion.”
Spatial Price Differences in China: Estimates and Implications (2005, methodology): “This augmented definition approaches the household consumption measure in the National Income Accounts, a second income measure that is also directly used in some inequality studies, with data provided by the NBS (see, e.g., Zhang and Kanbur 2001).”
The Developing World's Bulging (but Vulnerable) 'Middle Class' (2009, unknown): “21 A similar point is made by Zhang and Kanbur (2001), using data for China.”
Regional Inequality and Regional Polarization in Russia, 1990–99 (2002, background): “Findings about the similar behavior of ER and W polarization measures relatively to inequality measures were also reported in Zhang and Kanbur (2001) for China.”