Does Population Matter in Accessing Inequality in China1/EST-CE QUE LA POPULATION IMPORTE DANS L'INEGALITE DE L'ACCES ?

Abstract: In accessing inequality all over the world, recent research by Fischer has found an interesting result: without regard to population size, incomes in poor countries grew slower than incomes in rich countries, implying that the poor are falling behind and that cross-country inequality is getting worse. However a population weighted analysis indicates that the poor are growing faster, which implies both catch-up and narrowing inequality. An attempt is made in this paper to examine whether the same pattern of inequality applies to the case of provincial comparison in China. Our finding shows, even after taking into consideration of population and using the improved accessing method, we find no evidence of less inequality across all the people. Key words: inequality, population weighted, convergence, divergence Resume: Sur l'inegalite de l'acces dans le monde entier, les recherches recentes effectuees par Fischer ont trouve un resultat interessant : sans relation avec la taille de la population, les revenus dans les pays pauvres croissent plus lentement que dans les pays riches, cela implique que les pauvres sont en retard et que l'inegalite transnationale devient de plus en plus grave. Neanmoins, une analyse qui met l'accent sur la population montre que les pauvres augmentent plus rapidement, qui implique le rattrapage et l'inegalite diminue. L'article present tente d'examiner si le meme modele d'inegalite est applicable a la comparaison provinciale en Chine. Les resultats montrent que, meme en mettant en consideration la population et en utilisant la methode d'acces amelioree, on n'a pas trouve la preuve d'une inegalite decrue a travers toute la population. Mots-Cles: inegalite, population qui importe, convergence, divergence 1. INTRODUCTION Economic inequality has always been one of the most popular discussion topics in development economics. This is particularly true when the previously neglected field of development economics was rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s (Ranis, 2004). Recently, many studies have been constantly focusing on the economic inequality in the world (Sala-i-Martin, 2002; Pritchett, 1997), especially the widening gap between the rich and the poor in the world's most populous country, namely China (Yang, 1999; Wei, 2001; Wei, 2002; Gustafsson and Li, 2002). Last decade has seen plenty of literatures addressing the issue of regional disparity and income inequality in China. One question concerning the base of comparison remains to be clarified. Which matters more? Whether inequality is widening among provinces, or whether inequality is widening among all the people of the whole nation, regardless of which province they happen to live in? If the latter question turned out to be of more relevance, i.e., measuring across all the nation's individuals, then population becomes an important factor. Hence when looking at regional disparity across provinces, an attempt is made in this paper to examine the tendency towards convergence in real per capita income among the provinces in China during the period 1990-2003 and to analyze the population-weighted inequality among these provinces. The group of poor provinces accounting for a big share of all the poor people in the country will be investigated with particular attention so as to find out how they affect the inequality among all the people. 2. LITERATUR EREVIEW In examining economic inequality around the world, Stanley Fischer, former deputey chief of the International Monetary Fund, to the American Economic Association, propounded three important steps which are deemed necessary (Fisher, 2003). The first two steps are to show whether the within-country income inequality and the cross-country income inequality are widening. The third one is to show whether the overall income inequality is widening globally. Presumably, inequality measured across countries is widening, or the gap between average incomes in the richest countries and average income in the poorest countries is growing. …

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