Regional Inequality In China: An Overview

Abstract

China’s spectacular growth and poverty reduction has been accompanied by growing inequality which threatens the social compact and thus the political basis for economic growth and social development. The regional dimension of inequality— rural/urban, inland/coastal and provincial—dominates in a country as large as China, and especially with its particular history. The three of us have been researching Chinese regional inequality for over a decade. In a series of papers which have been published in peer reviewed journals, we have been involved in a systematic investigation into the nature and evolution of regional inequality in China. The object of this volume is to bring together a selection of these papers by us and our co-authors, so that researchers and policy makers can have access to them in one place. This introduction provides an overview of the volume.