Changing Trends in China's Inequality

About this book

"This work provides a new, comprehensive, and empirically grounded study of household incomes in China that critically examines the long-term rise and recent apparent decline in inequality. It covers incomes and inequality nationwide as well as separately in the urban and rural sectors, with close attention to measurement issues and to underlying changes in the economy, institutions, and public policy. The chapters examine a range of related topics, including the inequality of wealth, the emergence of a new middle class, the income gap between the Han and the ethnic minorities, the gender wage gap, and the impacts of government policies, such as social welfare programs and the minimum wage. A distinguishing feature of the book is its use of data from the China Household Income Project (CHIP), a collaborative, international research project that has organized nationwide household surveys spanning 1988, 1995, 2002, 2007, and, most recently, 2013. The CHIP data make possible to provide a consistent picture of the evolution of China's income and inequality from the late 1980s to the beginning of the Xi Jinping era. Analyses of the 2013 CHIP data, with comparisons to findings from past rounds of the survey, reveal new trends in China's inequality"--