Labor Market Distortions, Rural-Urban Inequality, and the Opening of People's Republic of China's Economy

Thomas Hertel and Fan Zhai

No 59, ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: This paper evaluates the impact of some key factor market reforms on rural–urban inequality and income distribution, using a household-disaggregated, recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of People's Republic of China. It also explores how these factor market reforms interact with product market reforms currently under way as part of the country's WTO accession process. The simulation results show that reforms in the rural land rental market and hukou system, as well as increasing off-farm labor mobility, would reduce the urban–rural income ratio dramatically. Furthermore, the combination of WTO accession and factor market reforms improves both efficiency and equality significantly.

Keywords: factor market reforms; income distribution; Peoples Republic of China; rural-urban inequality; WTO accession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D58 O15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2004-11-01
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.adb.org/publications/labor-market-dist ... -opening-prc-economy Full text (text/html)
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:ris:adbewp:0059

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank 6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550 Metro Manila, Philippines. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Orlee Velarde ().