Income Inequality During China's Economic Transition

By D. Benjamin, L. Brandt, J. Giles, Sangui Wang. 2005

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides an overview of the evolution of income inequality in China from 1987 to 2002, employing three series of data sets. Our focus is on both urban and rural inequality, as well as the urban-rural gap, with the objective of summarizing several “first-order” empirical patterns concerning the trajectory of inequality through the reform period. We document significant increases of inequality within China’s urban and rural populations. In rural areas, increased inequality is primarily related to the dis-equalizing role of non-agricultural self-employment income and slow growth in agricultural income from the mid-1990s onward. Poverty persists, and tied in part to slow growth in agricultural commodity prices. In urban areas, the declining role of subsidies and entitlements, the increase in wage inequality and the layoffs during restructuring, have fueled the growth in inequality within urban areas. Poverty levels, however, are very low. We find that spatial (regional) dimensions of inequality are significant, but are much less important than commonly believed for both the urban and rural populations, and for differences between urban and rural areas. Accounting for urban-rural reclassification, which otherwise exaggerates the rising urban-rural gap, we find a relatively stable ratio of urban to rural incomes. This hides some geographical variation, however: The urban-rural gap is increasing more rapidly in interior provinces, where SOE’s had a more dominant role in economic activity in urban areas, than in coastal provinces where the non-state sector was more important earlier in the reform period.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f1ad053397a3b14e73aa75df3f4dc4ff5fe0c4c9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Jamie Peck
2. J. Giles
3. H. Gong
4. A. Leigh
5. Jun Zhang
6. Changbao Zhao
7. Xin Meng
8. Dewen Wang

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Dewen Wang
2. Changbao Zhao
3. J. Giles
4. A. Leigh
5. H. Gong
6. Jun Zhang
7. Xin Meng
8. Jamie Peck

Citations in the corpus

• Growing Like China (2011, unknown): “3 The falling labor share has contributed to rising inequality even across urban households ( Dwayne Benjamin, Brandt, John Giles, and Sangui Wang 2008 .”
• Intergenerational Income Mobility in Urban China (2012, background): “During the Maoist era (1949–77), social welfare was universally provided in urban areas, with the aim of making Chinese society more egalitarian.1 By and large, this successfully compressed the distribution of income and wealth over the Maoist period (Meng, 2004, 2007; Benjamin et al., 2005).”
• Can China’s Rural Elderly Count on Support from Adult Children? Implications of Rural-to-Urban Migration (2010, background): “While average income has risen considerably, it is also well documented that not all regions of the country have benefited uniformly (Ravallion and Chen 2007; Benjamin et al. 2008 ).”
• A variety of capitalism … with Chinese characteristics? (2013, background): “In the space of a few decades, the Chinese social structure has lurched from one of the world’s most egalitarian to one of its most polarized (cf. Benjamin et al., 2008; Gustafsson et al., 2008).”
• Capital Accumulation, Private Property, and Rising Inequality in China, 1978–2015 (2019, unknown): “See, e.g., Piketty and Qian (2009); Benjamin, Brandt, and Giles (2005); Benjamin et al. (2008); Chi, Li, and Yu (2011); Chi (2012); Gustafsson, Li, and Sicular (2008); Gustafsson et al. (2008); Khan and Riskin (2008, 2005); Knight, Li, and Wan (2016); Knight (2014); Li, Sato, and Sicular (2013);…”