Trends and Inequalities of Rural Welfare in China: Evidence from Rural Households in Guangdong and Sichuan

This paper studies the trend of Chinese rural welfare and its inequality in the second half of the 1980's using rural household survey data of Guangdong and Sichuan. In this connection, different indicators of economic well-being are used. Compared with other transitional economies, rural inequality in China increased moderately in the second half of the 1980's. In spite of a more rapid pace of transition, Guangdong's rural inequality did not increase. No monotonic relationship between the pace of transition and rural inequality is thus discernible. Finally, by decomposing overall rural inequality into its between-region and within-region inequalities, we explore the relative importance of inter-provincial inequality.J. Comp. Econom.,December 1998, 26(4), pp. 783–804. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong.     

Social welfare orderings for ratio-scale measurable utilities

Summary. This article characterizes all of the continuous social welfare orderings which satisfy the Weak (resp. Strong) Pareto principle when utilities are ratio-scale measurable. With Weak Pareto, on both the nonnegative and positive orthants the social welfare ordering must be representable by a weakly increasing Cobb-Douglas social welfare function while on the whole Euclidean space the social welfare ordering must be strongly dictatorial. With Strong Pareto, on the positive orthant the social welfare ordering must be representable by a strictly increasing Cobb-Douglas social welfare function but on the other two domains an impossibility theorem is obtained. Received: July 31, 1995; revised version August 7, 1996     

Economic reform and interprovincial inequalities in China

This note is an attempt to explore two issues: (1) the trend of interprovincial inequality in the post-1978 reform era in China; and (2) the factors behind the dynamics of interprovincial inequality. Using recently released provincial gross domestic product (GDP) data, we have shown that interprovincial inequality decreased in the fast half of the 1980s, but started to increase in the second half of the 1980s. To understand the impact of sectoral reforms on interprovincial inequality, the overall inequality in provincial per capita GDP is decomposed into the contributions by the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. It seems that the trend of interprovincial inequality has been largely induced by the reforms of the industrial sector which make up a large share of the secondary sector. In addition, national income data from the socialist national accounting system are used to identify the impact of interprovincial resource flows on interprovincial inequalities. The findings seem to suggest a relative decline in the role of redistributive budgetary transfers.     

Growth-equity decomposition of a change in poverty: An axiomatic approach

This paper studies a class of subgroup decomposable poverty measures whose changes may be decomposed into a growth component and a redistribution component. A set of reasonable axioms leads inexorably to a combination of the Watts measure and the poverty gap measure.     

FORCES SHAPING CHINA'S INTERPROVINCIAL INEQUALITY

This paper explores the forces that shaped China's interprovincial inequality in the last five decades of Communist rule. In so far as the change in interprovincial inequality is the result of differential growth in provincial GDP per capita and provincial economic growth, it may be decomposed into contributions by total factor productivity (TFP) and other factor inputs. A new method is introduced to make this decomposition. Care is exercised in taking into account problems of Chinese official data when implementing the decomposition analysis. The findings suggest that TFP and factor inputs exerted different and sometimes opposing effects on interprovincial inequality in the Maoist and reform era. The increase in inequality from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s is due to the contribution of TFP overwhelming that of physical capital. The opposite is true for the 1980s. The increase in the 1990s is mainly driven by the skewed distribution of investments in favor of the richer coastal provinces reinforced by the increasing contribution of TFP.     

A new class of deprivation-based generalized Gini indices

Summary. This paper attempts to merge two strands of the literature on relative deprivation and generalized Gini indices by designing a new class of generalized Gini indices based on the concept of relative deprivation. In this connection, rank-dependent marginal deprivation functions are introduced. A new class of generalized Gini indices is derived axiomatically. It turns out to be the sum of modified versions of the S-Gini and the I-Gini introduced by Donaldson and Weymark (1980). Received: December 23, 1998; revised version: November 9, 1999