Employment inequality in China

Jie Yang and Chuanchuan Zhang

Chapter 3 in Handbook on Inequality in China, 2025, pp 40-59 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Abstract: The Chinese labor market has undergone a set of transformations since 1978. Concurrent with the transformations, inequality rose during the same period. This chapter provides an overview of research on employment inequality in China's labor market across three different dimensions: gender, hukou, and ownership type. We show that China has witnessed a decline in female labor force participation and in the female employment rate and an increasing gender wage gap since the beginning of market reforms. Besides, rural migrants still face unequal treatment in terms of access to jobs, earnings, public services, and social welfare compared to their urban counterparts. Furthermore, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) provide higher wages and benefits to workers than other types of employers, though the wage gaps across ownership have narrowed substantially. Institutional and structural changes, demographic transition, cultural factors, and other redistributive policies may constitute potential explanations for the patterns of employment inequality we observed.

Keywords: China; Employment inequality; Wage inequality; Gender; Hukou status; Ownership type (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035317790
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035317806.00007 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:elg:eechap:22613_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().