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This paper redefines the connotation of China's human development in the context of the new development concept and high-quality development, and constructs the China Human Development Index (CHDI) indicator system accordingly. Then, based on the inequality adjustment model and DFA model, the human development level of each region in China from 1990 to 2018 is measured, and the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of China's CHDI and the current situation of regional imbalance are analyzed accordingly. Finally, LMDI decomposition technique and spatial econometric model were used to study the influencing factors of China's human development index. The results show that: (1) The weights of the CHDI sub-index estimated by the DFA model have good stability, and it is a relatively good objective weighting method. (2) Compared with the HDI, the CHDI in this paper can better reflect the level of human development in China. (3) China's human development has made great achievements and has basically achieved the leap from the low human development level group to the high human development level group. However, there are still significant gaps between regions. (4) From the results of LMDI decomposition, the livelihood index is the most important driving index of CHDI growth in each region. From the results of spatial econometric regressions, there is a strong spatial autocorrelation of China's CHDI among the 31 provinces. GDP per capita, financial education expenditure per capita, urbanization rate, and financial health expenditure per capita are the main influencing factors of CHDI. Based on the above research findings, this paper proposes a scientific and effective macroeconomic policy with important reference value for promoting the high-quality development of China's economy and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trends in inequality in China suggest that there has been a significant increase in inequality in the distribution of income from around 0.30 in 1980 to 0.55 in 2012. Research over the last two decades has focused on identifying the main drivers of the increase in inequality. The main objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between urbanization and income inequality in China using provincial level data over the period 1987-2010. Using a panel of data for 20 provinces collected from the Chinese Statistical Yearbooks for five selected years. The empirical analysis based on OLS, fixed and random effects models, show a robust inverted-U relationship between inequality and urbanization. A threshold rate of urbanization of 0.53 has been identified with the implication that provinces with levels of urbanization higher than the threshold will experience reductions in income inequality. The second objective of the paper investigates the role of urbanization and the rural-urban wage differential on provincial inequality. Based on data from a representative cross-section of six provinces covering the period 1987-2005, we find that well-developed or income rich regions tend to have lower rural-urban inequality and higher migrant inflows and the rural-urban wage gap make significant contributions to income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates income inequality in post-reform China using both national time series and provincial panel data from 1978 to 2011. We identify a Kuznets inverted-U relationship between economic development and income inequality and show that this relationship was driven by the process of urbanization. We estimate that the Kuznets turning point occurred in the mid-1980s, and argue that increased urbanization after the mid-1980s had the effect of narrowing income inequality but its effect was more than offset by other factors. In particular, we found that low productivity in agriculture relative to that of the economy as a whole (i.e., dualism) and inflation were significant contributing factors to income inequality. We also present evidence to suggest that secondary education and higher education may have different effects on income inequality at the national level and at the provincial level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]