Increasing wage inequality is a feature of many economies in recent years, and the same is true of China. Whereas in most countries it is normally interpreted as a move from one market equilibrium to another, in China it is more likely to reflect a move away from extreme disequilibirum. Two...

The empirical literature on the economics of happiness has grown rapidly, and much has been learned about the determinants of subjective well-being.  Less attention has been paid to its normative implications.  Taking China as a case study, this paper first summarises empirical results on the...

We analyse intertemporal poverty in two important dimensions - income and nutrition - in less developed northwest China during 2000-2004.  A generalised recursive selection model is proposed which enables simultaneous estimation of the causes of intertemporal poverty within and between...

In many economic applications involving comparisons of multivariate distributions, supermodularity of an objective function is a natural property for capturing a preference for greater interdependence.  One multivariate distribution dominates another according to the supermodular stochastic...

This paper investigates recent advances in our understanding of the global distribution of income, and produces the first estimates of global inequality that take into account data on the incomes of the top one percent within countries.  We discuss conceptual and methodological issues -...

How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple`s expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus...

For over a quarter of a century, the use of utility information based upon interpersonal comparisons has been seen as an escape route from the Arrow Impossibility Theorem. This paper critically examines this informational basis approach to social choice. Even with comparability of differences...

Two interesting results are obtained from CASS national household surveys of 1988 and 1995. First, there was a tendency for intra-provincial inequality in both earnings per worker and household income per capita not only to rise in each province but also to converge across provinces. Second,...

The paper analyses two cross-section national household surveys, relating to the years 1988 and 1995, to explain the rise in inequality of income that occured in Chine over those seven years. The Gini coefficient of household income per capita increased from 38 to 45 per cent, i.e. by 1,0...

This paper attempts to analyse certain significant aspects of increasing income inequality in China in the nineteen years since the start of economic system reform. Materials and data used in this paper are partly from a sample survey of rural and urban households made by the income distribution...