Analysis Of Shanghai Urban‐Rural Income Gap And Its Factors

Shanghai is one of China's most developed cities, but the big urban-rural income gap still exists and enlarges with the economic development. From 1990 to 2010,according to the statistics from Shanghai Statistics Bureau, the absolute value of Shanghai urban-rural per capita disposable income gap has risen from 518 Yuan to 18092 Yuan. And this number has reached 6133 Yuan if we take inflation into consideration, which is 11 times of that in 1990. So it is very urgent to narrow the income gap between urban and rural citizens in Shanghai to maintain the sustainable economic and social development and stability. Therefore, we need to study the changes of urban-rural income gap in Shanghai and find the factors that affect it most.First of all, this paper studied relevant literature review about the urban-rural income gap and concluded the path of the research, research methods and objectives. Then, it studied the present level of rural citizens'income of Shanghai and profile of Shanghai urban-rural income gap and its historical changes, and used principal component analysis and co-integration analysis to study the relationship between economic development in Shanghai and Shanghai urban-rural income gap, and got the following conclusions: 1, Shanghai's economic development and urban-rural income gap have two-way Granger causality. 2, The economic development factors enlarges Shanghai urban-rural income gap while more support to agricultural industry would help to narrow the urban-rural income gap.In addition, this paper further studied the problem of urban-rural income gap from a primary distribution perspective and found that the income gap did not narrow with the increasing of rural citizens'primary distributed income and this mainly attributes to the lack of education and limitation for employment for rural citizens which enlarge the primary distribution income gap between rural and urban citizens. Finally, based on the results of the paper, this paper put forward some policy suggestions including some specific measures to support the agricultural industry and increase the rural citizens'income.