China's regional inequality is a hotly debated topic in the literature, but the fundamental issue of measurement has somehow escaped from the deliberations. In this paper, we select several commonly used income indicators, inequality indices and concepts to measure China's inter-provincial inequality and compare the results. We find China's inter-provincial inequality is very sensitive to different measurements. These sensitivity analyses help us to understand the ongoing debates on China's regional income inequality. We also conduct a cross-country comparison to illustrate the broad ranking of China's regional inequality in the world. We find that China's regional inequality appears not to be as high as usually perceived, despite approaching an alarming level.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.