China's Retreat from Equality: Income Distribution and Economic Transition

摘要

The authors have engaged in a critical inquiry into the relationship between economic liberalization and income inequality in China. The dimensions of income inequality are extremely complex and the contributors have done exceptional work in attempting to disentangle the regional, class, ethnic, and gender aspects of income distribution. Most of the empirical work suggests that the increased competition in output and factor markets has increased income inequality, in many forms. However, most of the authors also postulate that increased penetration of competitive industrial manufacturing into rural areas will, in the long run, lead to overall income convergence, especially between rural and urban China. The 13 studies in this book make use of two national household income surveys, designed by the authors under the aegis of the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, for the years 1988 and 1995. For both years, a rural and urban sample was derived from surveys designed by the State Statistics Bureau. The studies in the book investigated the issues that contributed to income inequality, as well as, those issues that are outcomes of income inequality. This was a result of the survey's design which accumulated information on all forms of income (e.g., property, wages, subsidies, etc.) as well as human well-being indicators (e.g., rural poverty, malnutrition). The authors have emphasized a variety of aspects of income inequality including the following: urban versus rural areas, men versus women, wage workers versus those earning income from farming, and income variation by national region.