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Poverty Reduction in China: Trends and Causes

Zhang, Yin; & Wan, Guanghua. (2008). Poverty Reduction in China: Trends and Causes. In Wan, Guanghua (Ed.), Inequality and Growth in Modern China (pp. 13). Oxford University Press.

Zhang, Yin; & Wan, Guanghua. (2008). Poverty Reduction in China: Trends and Causes. In Wan, Guanghua (Ed.), Inequality and Growth in Modern China (pp. 13). Oxford University Press.

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This chapter investigates the trends and causes of poverty in China in the 1990s by applying the Shapley decomposition to unit-record household survey data. The changes in poverty trends are attributed to two proximate causes; income growth and shifts in relative income distribution. The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke measures are computed and decomposed, with different datasets and alternative assumptions about poverty lines and equivalence scales. Among the robust results are: (1) both income growth and favourable distributional changes can explain China's remarkable achievement in combating poverty in rural areas during the first half of the 1990s; and (2) in the second half of the 1990s, both rural and urban China suffered from rapidly rising inequality and stagnant income growth, leading to a slow-down in poverty reduction, even reversal of poverty trend.




CHAP

Inequality and Growth in Modern China


Zhang, Yin
Wan, Guanghua

Wan, Guanghua


2008





13




Oxford University Press


9780199535194

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199535194.003.0003



1603