A Study On The Measurement And Relevance Of Multidimensional Inequality In China

In recent years,economic development in China has attracted worldwide attention and the living standards of the people have improved significantly.However,behind the economic development,another problem gradually highlights: income gap is widening and this gap has been gradually extended to other areas of the economy and society.The 22 nd Human Development Report issued by the United Nations Development Program also makes it clear that there is indeed an imbalance in human development in China.If inequality phenomenon continues to spread,these inequalities are bound to further inhibit human development and China’s economic and social progress.After Sen puts forward the idea of "viability" and "capacity analysis",the development of mankind is no longer confined to the improvement of income level,but in all aspects of education,health,environment and other angles.Incorporating this idea into the field of inequality will find that traditional inequality in income may be disjointed with human development.The reason is that income perspective is single while human development is multidimensional,and the improvement or deterioration of income inequality does not necessarily mean that other dimensions have a synchronous development.Thus,the idea of "multidimensional" has become an important perspective of inequality,poverty,social welfare and related policy analysis.Compared with the traditional income inequality,multidimensional inequality enlarges the scope of consideration and includes inequality in the non-monetary category.At the same time,multidimensional inequality is not simply a simple summation of inequalities in various dimensions.It also considers the interactions and influences among inequalities in various dimensions,this interactions are particularly important in the multidimensional inequality problem.So the study of multidimensional inequality and the relationship among dimensions is the forefront of modern economics topics,but there is little domestic research in this area.In this paper,CFPS database is used to analyze the multidimensional inequality of income,education and medical,which can provide ideas for the discovery of new features of inequality in the new period and more abundant information for relevant policy making based on the empirical analysis.The main contents of this paper include:(1)Quantify multidimensional inequality.The results of various inequality indices based on different theoretical frameworks,a variety of parameters and different weight settings of single dimensional inequality and multidimensional inequality show that the income inequality decreases slowly,but its absolute level is high,which reflects the grim situation of the imbalance of income distribution of Chinese residents.It is necessary to guard against the polarization between rich and poor;the degree of inequality in education dimension is generally worse,which clearly point out that the ultimate degree of inequality in education has reached the international warning level and the expansion of education in recent years has not improved inequality;the inequality of the medical dimension becomes more serious,and this inequality is a Pro-rich inequality that is very unfavorable to the poor.Regardless of the methods,multidimensional inequality shows a consistent trend: deteriorating year by year.This is extremely unfavorable to human development,social stability and sustained economic growth.(2)An analysis of the relationship among inequality of all dimensions.The degree of contribution of the inequality between dimensions is given by Tsui index decomposition,and the direction of correlation between dimensions is positive;next,it is found that inequality between income dimension,education dimension and medical dimension does not exist in isolation from each other through Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition and its improvement and and all kinds of Quantile Regression from the perspective of feature factor and rate of return.Education inequality and medical inequality both reinforce income inequality by the disparity between the level of education and the level of health and the inequality of market returns.If the gap between Chinese residents’ education and medical dimensions is widened,income inequality will be strengthened to a certain extent.Income inequality has an exacerbated effect on inequality in education and inequality in medical care.Income,as the most important constraint on human capital investment and health investment,has a direct impact on education and physical fitness.An income gap will turn into a gap in education and medical dimensions.(3)Improve multidimensional inequality.On the basis of the study of the correlation between dimensions,the contribution degree of each dimension inequality is obtained by using the multidimensional inequality index decomposition,and the importance of multidimensional inequality is sorted by each dimension,and the dimension entry point of the multidimensional inequality problem is obtained;Further adapting the direct improvement method and the indirect improvement method according to the influence of the characteristic factors and the rate of return,applying the counter-factual thought to the analysis of the ways of improving the multidimensional inequality,analyzing the degree of multidimensional inequality improvement after the change of the core indicators of different dimensions,such as supporting low income,moderately adjusting high income or universal compulsory education.At the same time,it analyzes the multidimensional inequality between men and women,which is not affected by gender differences in the rate of return of each factor and between urban and rural areas,which enjoy the equal value of the return situation.Summarize the results obtained from a variety of angles and give practical policy recommendations to ease the multidimensional inequality from the perspective of the characteristics and the rate of return.