Emergence of Wealth Inequality in China: Evidence from Rural Household Survey, 1986 -2000

Kyeongwon Yoo

doi:10.11644/KIEP.JEAI.2003.7.2.110

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East Asian Economic Review Vol. 7, No. 2, 2003. pp. 155-182.

DOI https://dx.doi.org/10.11644/KIEP.JEAI.2003.7.2.110

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Emergence of Wealth Inequality in China: Evidence from Rural Household Survey, 1986 -2000

Author
Kyeongwon Yoo	Institute for Monetary and Economic Research, The Bank of Korea kwyoo@bok.or.kr

EAER is an open access journal distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license.

Abstract

Based on relatively recent household survey data (1986 2000) in rural China, this paper analyzes the composition and inequality in non-land wealth. We first document the evolution of rural households wealth during the sample period. Our results show that the housing assets have played a dominant role in their wealth composition although the share of the assets tends to decrease during the period. We also observe that financial and fixed assets have become relatively important in their wealth composition. Based on various inequality measures we are able to provide consistent evidence that the inequality of wealth distribution has worsened in rural China. We find that financial asset holdings appear to have significant unequalizing effect on the total non-land wealth distribution, mostly due to the growing differential in rural non-farm opportunities.

JEL classification: Q13, Q14, Q15, P25, O53

Keywords

Wealth, Inequality, Rural China

Language

English

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