East And West China Rural Residents' Income Gap, A Comparative Study

The question of income is always one of the most important fields hi economics. Accordingly improving the income of households, solving the imbalance of East China and West China has been paid more attention than before. Under the circumstances, the thesis tries to discover and explain the differences hi households' income between Shanxi province and Zhejiang province by researching the income data of the designed households.The investigation of designed households was based on the similar research of 1985 and was established hi 1986. The investigation involved 10 villages, about 2200 households hi Shanxi and Zhejiang separately. The thesis is mainly on the 1995-2000 data of the two provinces and has four chapters. The details are as follows:Chapter 1 is the introduction part. There are two sections: the first one describes the income status and questions about households of our rural; the second one introduces the framework, researching object and the method of the thesis.Chapter 2 is a part on theory and has two sections, too. Section 1 introduces the concept of income and theory on the gap of income, the differences between personal income and household income, hi addition, this section introduces the reasons of the income gap and the Gini coefficient is selected as the analyzing tool. Section 2 introduces the correlation theory on household organization and household economy. Household theory includes the household character theory and household economic action theory. The former combines the sociology and economics and the thesis selects the household organization and household lifecycle as the object of demonstration research. And the latter is mainly about the impact of industry structure on the economy of the rural.Chapter 3 is a demonstration part. Firstly, the compare of the income gap between the two provinces' households and the compare of the income gap between the households in the two provinces separately discover the disparities of income sources between the two provinces' households. And several indexes are applied to reveal the gross income and net income of the two provinces. Secondly, the thesis comprises four sections to analyze the reasons of the income gap between Shanxi and Zhejiang. Section 1 analyzes the income gap between the two provinces and try to find the relation between them. Section 2 analyzes the influence of household character on the income of household by utilizing the statistics tools. Section 3 analyzes the effect of non-agriculture action on the income of households. Section 4, the last section introduces the influence of other relative elements on the households' income simply. Chapter 4 sums up the thesis and draws conclusions. In detail, a model of household income is made up according to the contents of chapter 3 and the model point out that the key of increasing the households' income is improving the industry structure of country. Then several suggestions on policy are brought forward.