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Rural-urban segmentation in China remains high despite the implementation of economic reforms. Household survey and aggregate data show that per capita consumption and income levels in cities are still much higher than in rural areas. The disparity in consumption and income levels between urban and rural areas continues to rise after registering a short decline between 1978 and 1985. The continued rise of rural-urban disparity indicates the ineffectiveness of economic reforms introduced by the Chinese government in correcting the urban bias., INTRODUCTION The separation of rural and urban sectors has been a major feature of the Chinese economy, which has been studied extensively by economists.(1) Shortly after establishing the socialist regime [...]

Income was negatively associated with the mood states of confusion and tense in a sample of 406 community residents, but controls for age, sex, and education eliminated these associations.

The relationship between income and savings, and the impact of income uncertainty are examined in detail. Savings decisions are examined using the intertemporal substitution hypothesis.

Research describing decentralized redistribution in a federation and its distributive implications is presented. It is shown that in a mobile federation egalitarian out comes do not survive.

The use of the household as a unit of analysis for poverty measurement was investigated. The issues involved in expanding the unit of analysis to include nonfamily household relationships were also examined. Results showed that instability in households with nonfamily members was not a serious problem when inferring poverty from cross-sectional information. Analysis of resource sharing among different types of people within households also showed that nonfamily housemates were less likely to help out other household members in avoiding financial hardship.

We compare universal social programs with targeted social benefits. We define 'universality' as separability of the tax/transfer system in income and other non-monetary attributes, and introduce the concept of 'parallel equity' - a requirement that like differences in needs should be treated alike. We develop a model based on optimal tax theory that shows that under specified assumptions universality is efficient as well as equitable; departures from universality result in an inefficient structure of net marginal tax rates. Our key assumptions are that individual-specific needs necessitate a fixed exogenous monetary expenditure and that needs are exogenous, observable, and uncorrelated with other relevant variables. We then relax these assumptions and describe the limited circumstances under which departures from universality may be desirable.

This paper uses microdata from the 1992 Statistics Canada Family Expenditure Survey to provide evidence that male and female incomes do not always exert identical influences on household expenditures. The novelty of the paper lies in its demonstration that, while incomes may be pooled for some categories of consumption (e.g. housing), the income pooling hypothesis must be rejected for others. We also go beyond simply rejecting the pooling hypothesis to ask how male versus female income is used. Our results stress the on-going importance of traditional gender roles. For example, we find that expenditures on child care increase only with women's incomes - higher male income is not associated with higher expenditure on child care even when both spouses are full-time, full-year paid workers.