The economy of the People's Republic of China has a high degree of income inequality. According to the Asian Development Bank Institute, "before China implemented reform and opening-up policies in 1978, its income distribution pattern was characterized as egalitarian in all aspects."
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) estimated that China's Gini coefficient increased from 0.30 to 0.55 between 1980 and 2002. At this time, the Gini coefficient for rural–urban inequality was only 0.16. , the official Gini coefficient in China was 0.465; inequality was at its highest in the 2000s, with numerous sources reporting a significant decline in the 2010s.
History In a landmark paper published in the Review of Development Economics, economists Ravi Kanbur and Xiaobo Zhang conclude that there have been three peaks of inequality in China 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." Their research indicates that these periods of inequality are driven by "three key policy variables – the ratio of heavy industry to gross output value, the degree of decentralization, and the degree of openness." The study finds that the "heavy-industry development strategy played a key role in forming the enormous rural-urban gap in the pre-reform period, while openness and decentralization contributed to the rapid increase in inland-coastal disparity in the reform period of the 1980s and 90s." In other words, heavy industry development in the cities formed the initial rural-urban gap leading up to the reform period, and decentralization increased overall inequality, rural-urban inequality, and inland-coastal inequality as the economy opened up after the 1978 reform and opening up. Research conducted by Jeffrey Sachs on the entire period from 1952 to 1996 indicates that in general, regional income inequalities are driven by government policy, whereas income divergence is "strongly associated with the extent of marketization and openness."
Current state China is a newly industrialized country and an emerging economy, with quarterly GDP growth rates averaging 9.31%China remains a developing country despite fast GDP growth: FM. (2011, February 15). People's Daily Online. Retrieved from http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/7288824.html for the past two decades, powered mainly by strong exports. However, China still faces a number of socioeconomic issues, including the increasing income disparity between different groups of citizens, largely characterized by rural-urban income inequality. Despite steady growth of China's economy since economic reforms in 1978, the rural-urban income gap reached its widest in more than three decades in 2009. According to data from National Bureau of Statistics of China, at its widest disparity, city dwellers were earning 3.33 times as much as farmers (income ratio of 3.33:1), with per capita disposable income of urban households standing at RMB17175 while per capita net income of rural households at RMB5153.National Bureau of Statistics of China. (2011, February) Statistical Communiqué of the People's Republic of China on the 2010 National Economic and Social Development. Retrieved from NBS online: http://www.stats.gov.cn/was40/gjtjj_en_detail.jsp?searchword=Disposable+income&channelid=9528&record=3 In contrast, the income disparity was at its narrowest in 1983, at 1.82:1, due to effects of the Household-responsibility system introduced in 1978.Xiong Tong. (2011 January 21). China's urban, rural income gap widens despite economic recovery. Xinhuanet. Retrieved from As of year 2010, income ratio was recorded at 3.23:1 and per capita disposable income of urban households stood at RMB19109 while rural households' were at RMB5919. In 2014, according to an Institute of Social Science Survey, Peking University, income inequality among Chinese mainland citizens has reached severe conditions, with 1% of the Chinese population possessing 1/3 of the country's wealth. The existing high income inequality in China is primarily attributed to structural factors inherent in the Chinese political system, with the principal structural drivers being the urban-rural disparity and regional disparities in economic prosperity.
In 2012, a report published by Southwestern University of Finance and Economics estimated the Gini index of China at 0.61
China's government publishes an official yearly calculation of the country's Gini index. Beginning in 2008, China's Gini coefficient has decreased. According to these reports, the average Gini coefficient between residents was .475 between the years of 2003 and 2018, reaching a high of 0.491 in 2008 and a low of 0.462 in 2015. In 2019, China's official Gini coefficient was 0.465; various sources have debated the accuracy of this data, with the World Bank calculating 0.385 (2016) after factoring cheaper prices in rural areas while the World Inequality Database reporting higher numbers after factoring in pre-tax income and unreported income of richer segments. However, it is generally agreed among sources that China's inequality decreased significantly in the 2010s.
Despite income inequality in China, the absolute income of nearly all income groups has risen quickly. From 1988 to 2018, China's rural and urban populations had per capita increases in real income (i.e., accounting for inflation) of 8-10 times.
Factors
Urban-biased policies More than 10% of China's total inequality is attributed to the rural-urban gap, according to a study published in the PNAS. Research conducted by Dennis Tao Yang published in the journal of the American Economic Association indicates that the root of China's rural-urban divide "lies in the strategy of the centrally planned system that favored heavy-industry development and extracted agricultural surplus largely for urban capital accumulation and urban-based subsidies." In the 1980s and 1990s, state investments in the rural economy accounted for "less than 10 percent of the budget, despite the fact that the rural population was about 73-76 percent of the national population." Additionally, factor market distortions have created significant rural-urban inequalities. More specifically, research published in the Journal of Economic Modelling demonstrates that the Hukou system and absence of a fully functioning land market are two main drivers of rural-urban inequality.
Social security payments to urban workers is significantly greater than payments to rural farmers, which further contributes to inequality.
Inland-coastal inequality As is well documented in many studies, rural-urban inequality is a major contributing factor to general income inequality in China. However, "while the contribution of rural-urban inequality is much higher than that of inland-coastal inequality in terms of levels, the trend is very different. The rural-urban contribution has not changed very much over time, but the inland-coastal contribution has increased by several fold," meaning that inland-coastal inequality is playing an increasingly important role in the formation of general income inequality across China. A study found that variations across Chinese provinces account for about 12% of the country's overall income inequality. JournalistsResource.org, retrieved Aug. 21, 2014. Research on economic growth after the opening of the Chinese economy has shown that between 1989 and 2004, income in coastal provinces more than tripled whilst that in inland provinces doubled. Research on inland-coastal inequality indicates that "since being a coastal province is a geographic advantage that will persist, this tendency for divergence will also probably continue," but institutional factors still have a significant effect. Economists Ravi Kanbur and Xiao Zhang propose that the "greater ease of rural-to-urban migration within provinces, compared to the institutional and other difficulties of migrating from inland to coastal provinces" can partially explain this phenomenon. China's Hukou system is an institutional factor that significantly inhibits interprovincial migration. Recently, the government has introduced policies that relax Hukou related restrictions in small and medium-sized cities, in an effort to encourage growth. In 2005, it was recorded that rural incomes were less equally distributed than urban incomes, but urban inequality was rising faster than rural inequality.Wu, J. P. (2005). China's Income Distribution, 1985-2001. The Review of Economics and Statistics, pp. 87, 763-775.
Education According to research conducted at the World Bank, "inequality of access to education is an important source of inequality in China across people contemporaneously and across generations." In fact, "a decomposition analysis based on household income determination shows that the largest proportion of changes in total income can be attributed to the increase in returns to education." Urban-biased policies and inland-coastal inequality exacerbates the issue of education inequality in China. One of the primary issues is their generation of sector-biased income transfers and expenditures on health, housing and education, which "not only distort economic incentives of the workers in the sectors, but will also affect the human-capital attainments of their children, which may further widen the rural-urban income gap." In other words, inland and rural inequality can help create a vicious cycle by funneling money towards the coastal cities and away from investments in human capital elsewhere. Like in the United States, education funding is primarily the responsibility of local governments in China. As poor localities are less able to fund these services and poor households are less able to afford the high cost of basic education, China has seen an increase in inequality of education outcomes. For example, in 1998, per pupil expenditure in Beijing was 12 times that in Guizhou, and the difference had jumped to 15 times by 2001.
Demographic change According to research published in the China Economic Review, population aging is "largely responsible for the sharp increase in income inequality in rural China," especially at the beginning of the 2000s. As a result of Chinese governmental attempts to control population growth with the one-child policy implemented in 1979, many fewer young adults have reached the working age over the course of the past decade, leading to a significant "fall in the ratio of household members of working age." This created a labor shortage, which in combination with the rapid expansion of industrialization served to increase income inequality.
Assets from parents' generation For Chinese born in the 1980s and 1990s, parental wealth and income has had an increased impact on inequality. Inequality widened in their parents' generation particularly as income from assets (as opposed to income from labor) began to account for an increasing share of income. This was driven in significant part by the growing importance of real estate in the economy. Unlike forms of human capital, physical assets like real estate may be passed from generation to generation to continue to produce income.
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