The Role Of Government In Shortening The Income Gap Between Urban And Rural Areas

China's income gap between urban and rural areas has been widening since the reform and opening-up, which has become a bottleneck for realizing the common prosperity of the people across the country and for the sustainable development in our country. That also becomes one of the most important obstacle for our urbanization which has been lagged behind the industrialization. This essay has played an important and practical part in exploring the measurements to narrow the income gap between urban and rural residents, developing our economy sustainably, swiftlly and stably and improving people's living standards and quality of life, by analyzing the status of income gap between urban and rural residents and its cause.This essay makes a detailed comparison on the status of urban and rural income gap on the basis of the "to U theory," "dual economy theory" of Lewis and Schultz's "human capital theory", using a variety of methods. This essay makes comparative analysis on income absolute deviation, rate and consumption absolute deviation between urban and rural residents, while making comparative analysis on citizen's income between Guangdong and the whole nation. And the result shows that the gap in Guangdong is greater. On this basis, the reasons for the widening urban-rural income gap was explained from the aspects of the difference between urban and rural economic development pattern, the influence of dual economic structure, the unique migration policy and human capital differences and so on. Finally, the author brings up some the fundamental solutions to for the government to narrow the gap, considering the status, the development trends and its influence factors.