REGIONAL INCOME INEQUALITY AND URBANISATION TRENDS IN CHINA: 1978-2005

Alexandra Schaffar

Region et Developpement, 2008, vol. 28, 87-110

Abstract: A long-standing economic literature has delivered rich empirical evidence on the relationship between economic growth and income inequality or urbanisation, since Simon Kuznets’ pioneering work on the inverted U curve hypothesis. This paper explores the relationship between urban inequality and urbanisation trends in China from 1978 to 2005, a period that corresponds to the economic opening up of the country to the market economy. One of the main issues, here, is not only to test the correlation between regional income inequality and urbanisation trends, but also to highlight the neighbouring effects of this correlation, mainly through the use of some new spatial analysis tools. This paper delivers two conclusions: firstly, neighbouring effects are stronger when it comes to income inequality than urbanisation; secondly, a distortion in development patterns, between northern and southern coastal China appears: in the first one, growth effects and urbanisation process spread all over the different provinces, while in the second one, Guangdong appears as a regional economic centre.

Keywords: INCOME INEQUALITY; URBANISATION; CHINA; SPATIAL (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://regionetdeveloppement.univ-tln.fr/wp-content/uploads/5-Schaffar.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Regional income inequality and urbanisation trends in China: 1978-2005 (2008)
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:tou:journl:v:28:y:2008:p:87-110

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Region et Developpement from Region et Developpement, LEAD, Universite du Sud - Toulon Var Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christophe Van Huffel ().