Essays On Inequality In China:Under The Framework Of Capbility Approach

Over the past30years, China has bolstering economic growth, reducing poverty and increasing wealth on a grand scale. However, under the guidance of "GDP-obsessed assessments", the central government assesses the work of local governments by GDP alone, so that the local governments ignore people’s livelihood development. The incongruous between economic development and livelihoods development has been neglected over the past decades. Although rapid economic growth, the human well-begin in China didn’t show the synchronized development and enhancement. According to the Human Development Report in2013, China ranked ninetieth in the world in terms of national income per capita, but ranked101st in the world in terms of Human development Index which can reflect living quality very well. Such a huge difference between these two ranking is due to "GDP-obsessed assessments" as well as social inequality which is increasingly severe in China. Since the reform and opening-up of China, the rapid increase in economy brought in differentiation of the social stratum, which is not only reflected in increasing income inequality but also embodied in the problem of inequality in health and health care and inequality in education. All kinds of inequities presented in society means that the inequality in human well-being is more complicated than any one-dimensional inequality. Inequality in well-being will decrease social welfare. It is argued that individual well-being is determined by factors or variables that are beyond individuals’responsibility and by factors for which individuals are deemed responsible. The well-being inequality that is due to factors beyond individual control deemed ethically un-acceptable while those arising from factors under individual control are not considered offensive. Moreover the former (so-called inequality in opportunity) may suppress economic growth. This will make the relationship between economic development and human development more complicate. To deal with those complicated problems, we should an insight into social inequality in China. The present paper will explore inequality in multidimensional well-being and inequality in opportunity in China.Inequality in multidimensional well-being and inequality in opportunity are two of the frontier problems in modern welfare economics. However, the related researches in China are very rare and most of these researches had shortcomings. The present thesis will provide more information on inequalities in China by combining those two problems together. So, this study will be useful for government to formulate public policies.In this dissertation, I will use four chapters to do empirical study and the main conclusions can be separated into four part. Firstly, It can be showed that the micro mechanism of the incongruous between economic development and livelihoods development is that the people who are disadvantaged in non-income factors are also disadvantaged in sharing economic growth.Secondly, if we consume that individual well-being is determined by income, education and health, then, the inequality in multidimensional well-being in China was increasing over last decades. The loss of social welfare caused by the inequality in well-being is about15percent. The main reason for the well-being inequality is income inequality and the second reason is inequality in education, those two reasons explain88%of the total inequality in well-being. The impact of inequality in health on the total inequality in well-being is similar to that of the correlation between income, education and health and those two reasons explain12%of the total inequality in well-being. However, the impact of the correlation between the three factors is increase in inequality aversion parameter.Thirdly, inequality of opportunity is increasingly severe, moreover, the contribution of opportunity to earnings inequality increased during the sample period; Because of the accumulative effect in inequality of opportunity, the level of inequality of opportunity among older people is higher than that among young people; Comparing with inequality of opportunity of men, women suffer more inequality of opportunity in their earnings inequality; The difference of inequality of opportunity between east China and non-east China indicate that inequality of opportunity is associated with poor economic performances; The decomposition shows that family background plays an increasingly important role in total inequality of opportunity.Finally, subjective inequality of opportunity is correlation with preferences of individual for redistribution and prospects of mobility. Those who perceive more equality of opportunity tend to have prospects of upward mobility and don’t support redistributive policies.