Characteristics and trends of regional inequality in China: a multidimensional perspective

ABSTRACT

We conduct an empirical study on regional inequality, one of the main factors of the principal contradiction in China, using the provincial data from 2011 to 2019, from a multidimensional perspective. Inequalities are measured based on an approach that improves the applicability of inequality measures in multidimensional case. From the results, we find a continuous downward trend in overall regional inequality, but the performance of regional inequality differs across dimensions. Among four dimensions, regional inequality in the dimension of economy has been increasing and is substantially higher than others, and the sharp drop of inequality in ecology has greatly contributed to the decline in overall regional inequality since 2014. For sub-dimensions, we find that regional inequality in sub-dimensions including economic performance, economic innovation, economic infrastructure, ecological governance, and housing is at a relatively high level and on the rise, which should be Chinese government’s focus at the present stage.

KEYWORDS:

• Inequality measure
• regional inequality
• multidimensional
• China

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C43
• D63
• R13

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Indicators which are not related to regional inequality or invalid for regional comparison were not considered.

² As shown in Table 1, different weights are used according to the definition of different indicators.

³ The benchmark values are set according to the span of the data, target values in official documents, or empirical values. There is a certain degree of subjectivity in determining these settings, and some settings are greatly dependent on experience.

⁴ Values greater than 0.99 or less than 0.01 will be truncated.

⁵ The results of the A(1) and Theil method are generally consistent with the Gini method. For the sake of comparison, the figure only shows the measurement results of sub-dimensions in the years 2011,2015 and 2019.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China [18CTJ002].