Intercity Income Inequality Growth and Convergence in China

Gordon Anderson and Ying Ge ()
Additional contact information
Ying Ge: University of International Business and Economics

Journal of Income Distribution, 2009, vol. 18, issue 1, 70-89

Abstract: In the late 1970s China embarked upon a period of wide-ranging reforms, amongst which the Economic Reforms and the Open Door Policy can be counted. This article is to investigate ensuing patterns and trends in the interCity per-capita income distribution in China in the 1990s, after the reforms had been in place for a decade. The following methodologies are used: inequality and polarization indices, to illustrate basic trends, stochastic dominance techniques, to provide unambiguous economic welfare and poverty comparisons across regions and over time, and transition probability techniques and polarization/convergence tests, to study the long-run evolution of income distributions for Cities. The results suggest a significant welfare improvement and concomitant reduction in the poor status of Cities for all regions, with strict welfare dominance of the Eastern Coastal Area over the interior. They also indicate a significant convergence trend in the center (especially in the Eastern Coastal Area) toge her with a divergence trend in both lower and upper tails of interCity income distributions. Economic reform and globalization effects in the coastal area have driven convergence in the central mass; divergence in both tails of the distribution stems from the growing coastal-inland gap due to the unbalanced pace of the economic reform and globalization.

Keywords: size distribution of incomes; inequality; polarization; convergence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O15 O53 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://jid.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jid/article/view/22706 (application/pdf)
Some fulltext downloads are only available to subscribers. See JID website for details.

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:jid:journl:y:2009:v:18:i:1:p:70-89

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Income Distribution from Ad libros publications inc. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Timm Boenke ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).