Studies have shown that the previously growing inequality in China has stabilized and even declined since 2008 (Kanbur et al., 2021), nevertheless, the drivers of the latest trans-formation in income inequality remain to be unraveled. We address this research gap by examining the changes in the distribution of household disposable income and its drivers in China from 2010 to 2016. We apply the distributional decomposition method proposed by Bourguignon et al. (2008) and Sologon et al. (2021), and quantify the contribution of all factors into four general dimensions, (1) demographic composition, (2) labor market structure, (3) price and return, and (4) governmental transfers.
This study considers not only the individual labor income as with existing literature, but also models other family incomes and social transfers to reflect the real economic conditions more accurately. The decomposition results show that all four factors contribute positively to the decline in income inequality during the period studied. The changes in urban labor market structure, specifically the general forms of employment, occupational and industrial structure, have been contributing as inequality augmenting factors.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.