Urban expansion and the urban–rural income gap: Empirical evidence from China

Urban Bias, Rural-Urban Income Gap and Agricultural Growth: the Resource-Diverting Effect of Rural-Urban Income Gap in China

Urban bias has long been China’s dominant economic policy. The persistent urban bias leads to a severe rural-urban income gap and diverts physical as well as an effect of diverting the rural resource out of agricultural sector, and thus is detrimental to agricultural growth. This paper uses China’s provincial panel data from 1978 to 2007 to investigate the diverting effects of the rural-urban i...

The Urban-Rural Gap and Income Inequality in China

The Urban-Rural Income Gap and Inequality in China

Using new household survey data for 1995 and 2002, we investigate the size of China’s urban-rural income gap, the gap’s contribution to overall inequality in China, and the factors underlying the gap. Our analysis improves on past estimates by using a fuller measure of income, adjusting for spatial price differences and including migrants. Our methods include inequality decomposition by populat...

Globalization and regional income inequality: Empirical evidence from within China

China’s recent accession to the WTO is expected to accelerate its integration into the world economy, which aggravates concerns over the impact of globalization on the already rising inter-regional income inequality in China. This paper discusses China’s globalization process and estimates an income generating function, incorporating trade and FDI variables. It then applies the newly developed ...

How Large is the Urban-Rural Income Gap in China?

China's current official official household survey has failed to effectively cover the rural-to-urban migrants, which overstates the income of urban residents and understates the income of rural residents, and then overstates the urban-rural income gap in China. Our survey shows that the urban household survey basically neither cover the migrant households (missing households), nor the migrant ...