A Study On Bidirectional Effect Between Inequality In Educational Opportunity And Income Gap In China

How to balance efficiency and fairness in the process of economic development is the constant theme in economicresearch.Since the reform and opening up,along with the rapid development of China's economy,people's living standards have improved significantly,but the income gap has not been effectively improved.According to previous studies,the widening income gap is not only detrimental to the sustained and healthy development of the economy,but the serious gap between the rich and the poor will affect the harmony and stability of society.Therefore,it is imperative to explore effective ways to narrow the income gap.Among the many factors affecting income distribution,education distribution has always occupied an important position.In the era of knowledge economy and the social background of rejuvenating the country through science and education,China's educational development has made remarkable achievements,but the ensuing unfair distribution of educational opportunities cannot be ignored.The purpose of this paper is to explore the interaction between educational opportunity inequality and income gap in the process of economic development.The research on the two-way relationship between education opportunity inequality and income disparity can not only enrich the research results in related fields,but also provide an important theoretical reference for ensuring fairness of educational opportunities and narrowing the income gap.In addition,the research results of this paper will help to raise the awareness of fairness in the whole society and promote the establishment of a social equity system.In the long run,this will help maintain social harmony and stability and promote sustained and healthy economic development.This paper draws on Roemer's environment-effort binary analysis framework,which divides the factors affecting individual educational achievement into two categories:one is the uncontrollable environmental factors including gender,urban and rural background,parental occupation type,parental education level and family class;the other is the individual controllable effort factor.This paper uses the micro data of China Comprehensive Social Survey(CGSS)in 2003,2005,2006,2008,2010,2011,2012,2013 and 2015,and draws on the parameter measurement method of opportunity inequality proposed by Ferreira and Gignoux(2011)to decompose educational inequality into the index of educational opportunity inequality and educational effort inequality at the provincial level.The measurement results show that absolute educational opportunity inequality and educational effort inequality have an upward trend during the sample period,but from the relative value of the two,the proportion of educational inequality in overall inequality increases,while the proportion of educational effort inequality decreases.After introducing the theory of the interaction between education opportunity inequality and the income gap,this paper discusses the improved Golor and Zeria theoretical models,and proves that under the condition of uneven distribution of initial wealth,not only in the short term will cause uneven distribution of educational opportunities,in the long run,the poor poorer and the richer getting richer Matthew Effect will also eventually form a worsening income distribution in society.In order to empirically test the relationship between educational opportunity inequality and income gap in China,this paper combines macro variables with microdatameasured above Then use the simultaneous equation model to empirically test the two-way relationship between educational opportunity inequality and income gap whichis regarded as the endogenous variables that affect each other.The study found that there is a two-way interactive relationshipbetween educational inequality and income gap.Inequalities in educational opportunities and educational efforts will widen the income gap,which will in turn affect the distribution of educational opportunities and expand the unequal educational opportunities among individuals.In the absence of external intervention,the educational opportunity inequality and the widening income gap will fall into a vicious circle.In addition,this paper confirms the inverted U-type relationship between education expansion and income gap,that is,the income gap widens in the early stage of education expansion and with the development of education,education expansion will eventually narrow the income gap.Education expansion can alsoreduce the unequal educational opportunities.The government's educational investment has not improved the current situation of unequal distribution of educational opportunities.In addition,the level of economic development has a positive impact on educational inequality and income disparity.The level of opening up will expand the income gap,and the upgrading of industrial structure will improve the income gap.Compared with previous studies on education inequality and income disparity,this paper does not use the standard deviation of education years or the Gini coefficient as a measure of educational inequality,but instead divides educational inequality into environmental-effort factors to highlight the investigation of unequal educational opportunities.In addition,most of the relevant literatures have a one-way investigation from the impact of educational inequality on the income gap,ignoring the interaction between the two.On this basis,this paper analyzes the unreasonable factors in educational inequality from the perspective of fairness and justice--the two-way interaction between educational opportunity inequality and income gap,enriching the research results in related fields.