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This paper provides a survey of the literature on inequality in China – level, change, causes, and consequences. It attempts to answer six main questions. How much has inequality risen? What is its relation to poverty alleviation? What has happened to wealth inequality? What are the main dimensions of rising income inequality? The dimensions examined are: the rural–urban divide; urban labor market reform; regional divergence; rural–urban migration; and entrepreneurship, rent-seeking, and corruption. Was it inevitable that inequality should rise so much? Does it matter that inequality has risen? Income distribution in China is bound up with both economic reform and economic growth. This paper concludes by considering the countervailing forces that will determine the path of inequality in future years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines recent trends in inequality and poverty and the effects of distributional policies in China. After a discussion of data and measurement issues, we present evidence on national, as well as rural and urban, inequality and poverty. We critically examine a selection of policies pursued during the Hu–Wen decade that had explicit distributional objectives: the individual income tax, the elimination of agricultural taxes and fees, minimum wage policies, the relaxation of restrictions on rural–urban migration, the minimum living standard guarantee programme, the “open up the west” development strategy, and the development-oriented rural poverty reduction programme. Despite these policies, income inequality in China increased substantially from the mid-1990s through to 2008. Although inequality stabilized after 2008, the level of inequality remained moderately high by international standards. The ongoing urban–rural income gap and rapid growth in income from private assets and wealth have contributed to these trends in inequality. Policies relaxing restrictions on rural–urban migration have moderated inequality. Our review of selected distributional policies suggests that not all policy measures have been equally effective in ameliorating inequality and poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The urban-rural disparity is a common phenomenon in most developing economies. In particular, this disparity is strengthened by the household registration (Hukou) system in China. Chinese economy, as well as its income inequality, rose dramatically in last decades. Most researches show that urban-rural disparity is an important source of income inequality. In this paper we study the impact of this disparity on innovation through the demand for quality goods. For simplicity, we assume that there are two types of consumers: rich people living in the urban and poor people living in the rural area. The income distribution is measured by the population share of the poor and the relative income of the poor. The larger the income difference between the rural and the urban area, the more individuals migrate to the city in order to improve their income. Firms first invent quality goods, and then produce them in an oligopolistic market. Rich consumers have a higher willingness to pay for the better quality than the poor. Hence, the firms' profit depends on the income distribution of consumers. We focus on the separating equilibrium, where goods of different qualities are sold to different consumers. In this equilibrium, a lower relative income of the poor is good for innovation, while a larger population share of the poor is bad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on land use planning topics, including "Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow," "More Than Sector Theory: Homer Hoyt's Contributions to Planning Knowledge" and "Methodology for the Survival Analysis of Urban Building Stocks."

To use the generalized beta distribution of the second kind (GB2) for the analysis of income and other positively skewed distributions, knowledge of estimation methods and the ability to compute quantities of interest from the estimated parameters are required. We review estimation methodology that has appeared in the literature, and summarize expressions for inequality, poverty, and pro-poor growth that can be used to compute these measures from GB2 parameter estimates. An application to data from China and Indonesia is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]