This introductory chapter provides background to and summarizes key findings from the chapters in this book, all of which share in common their use of household data from the latest round of the China Household Income Project (CHIP) survey to analyze recent trends in inequality in China. We...

Chapter from: 'Rising Inequality in China: Challenge to a Harmonious Society', edited by Shi Li, Hiroshi Sato and Terry Sicular.

Using new household survey data for 1995 and 2002, we investigate the size of China’s urban-rural income gap, the gap’s contribution to overall inequality in China, and the factors underlying the gap. Our analysis improves on past estimates by using a fuller measure of income, adjusting for...

Subjective Poverty Line methodology is applied to rural China 2002 using a sample from 22 provinces. Respondents were asked two questions: one on amount of food necessary and another on amount of cash necessary for their households. The respondent's perception of how much cash is needed varies...

Chapter from: 'Rising Inequality in China: Challenge to a Harmonious Society', edited by Shi Li, Hiroshi Sato and Terry Sicular.

Background: Industrial income differential is the most important cause of the public dissatisfaction with the income inequality in China. The high income of monopoly industries is now the typical one of the massive income inequity phenomena. But objectively speaking, not all high income of...

This paper offers a new way of assessing government cash transfers using a social welfare function framework. It demonstrates how one can use social welfare functions to measure the efficiency of such program s without requir ing the specif ication of a poverty line or particular poverty...

The purpose of this work is to evaluate the redistributive role of government social security transfers on inequality in China. We attempt to answer two questions. First, does inequality of after-transfer income narrow, compared to that of before-transfer income? Second, given the scale and...

This paper studies the impact of income inequality on the subjective well-being of different social groups in urban China. We classify urban social groups according to their hukou status: rural migrants, 'born?urban residents, and 'acquired?urban residents who once changed their hukou identity...

In this paper, we use the '2002 Chinese Household Income Project Survey'(CHIPS2002) data to examine how heterogeneous social interactions affect the peer effect in the rural-urban migration decision in China. We find that the peer effect, measured by the village migration ratio, significantly...