Fleshing Out the Olive? On Income Polarization in China

Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen

No 29383, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In a rare example of an explicit national goal for income distribution besides reducing poverty, China’s leadership has recently committed to expanding the middle-income share—moving to a less polarized “olive-shaped” distribution. Recognizing the potential trade-offs, the paper asks whether China’s experience indicates that income-polarization was a by-product of past economic progress, including poverty reduction. The paper does not find robust time-series evidence of polarizing effects alongside either economic growth or population urbanization (including among those below the national median). There was strong co-movement between polarization and inequality. Larger urban-rural gaps in mean incomes are strongly polarizing in China.

JEL-codes: I32 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-ltv
Note: DEV
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29383.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29383

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29383

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().