One of the most notable social phenomena in China is the large urban-rural disparity. There are many studies of it, but most of them focus on income or earnings inequality. In this paper, we investigate the consumption disparity between urban and rural households in China from 1988 to 2002. Our...

"The gap between those living in the city and those in the countryside remains one of China's most intractable problems. As this powerful work of grassroots history argues, the origins of China's rural-urban divide can be traced back to the Mao Zedong era. While Mao pledged to remove the gap...