Research On The Income Disparity Between Urban And Rural Areas In China

Since the reform and opening up, China’s economic development has attractedworldwide attention and people’s living standards in general has been greatlyimproved, but the income gap between urban and rural areas has also been growing.Justice is an inherent requirement of social development, so the economicachievements should be shared by all residents in accordance with the requirements.The expansion of China’s urban-rural income gap apparently does not meet thisrequirement. The expansion of urban-rural income disparity is harmful to socialstability directly. In the long run, it will influence the efficiency and quality of thecountry’s economic development and the realization of socialism harmonious society.Therefore, it is an important problem to be solved for China to narrow the urban-ruralincome gap with keeping the economy growing healthily and sustainably, which isalso the starting point and foothold of this paper. Currently, researches of urban-ruralincome disparity contain three directions: its measuring indictors, the situation andtrend of it, its influencing factors. Firstly, these studies are reviewed, and then thearticle measures the urban-rural income disparity of the whole nation and everyprovince by urban-rural income ratio, which is most widely used in research. Thepaper uses the ratio to analyze the spatial and temporal characteristics of the disparity,and concludes that since the reform and opening up the overall income gap betweenurban and rural areas shows a rising trend and the income gap between urban andrural areas and their movements of all the provinces basically consistent with thenational level. Then, we analyses a series of factors which result to the income gap,finding that urban-rural dual economic structure of China is the source of it. The gapcontinues to widen since the founding of New China for the government make urbanbias policies based on priority development of heavy industry. Urban-rural differencesin the stock of human capital and investments led to a huge gap in the ability of improving their income. Rural residents can’t be unable to change their povertysituation. Therefore, accelerating the reform of the household registration system,breaking the urban-rural dual economic structure, accelerating urbanization,promoting rural financial services and education and so on will help to narrow theincome gap between urban and rural areas.