Mind the gaps: a political economy of the multiple dimensions of China's rural-urban divide

Abstract

China's impressive growth has been accompanied by high inequality and a wide rural-urban divide. This paper identifies and examines some of the major dimensions of this divide: income, consumption, education, employment, health care, pensions, access to public services, and the environment. The paper attributes the main causes of the divide to China's urban-biased development strategies and the resulting lack of social provision of public goods in rural areas. It also highlights the severe and multidimensional constraints on the Chinese peasantry and argues that increased equality and efficiency can now be pursued simultaneously.

Literature Review on Educational Attainment of Migrant Children in China

“…Hukou has regulated Chinese internal population migration for almost 60 years [3]. More importantly, together with the widening rural-urban divide along China's economic development [15], the hukou system has established hierarchies for income, housing, education, employment, retirement benefits, and medical and other services [3] [16] [17].…”

“…The ratio of urban to rural household income per capita was estimated to be around three in 2013 [5], and the CHIP survey found it to be 4.1 in 2007 [16]. The huge gap between urban and rural education is embedded in the disparity in educational investment [25], children's educational attainment [87]- [91], school quality [17] and the returns to the education [15] [92]. The local selective adaptation of central educational policy led to even more diverse conditions of compulsory education for migrant children across the nation [30].…”

Approaching Integrated Urban-Rural Development in China: The Changing Institutional Roles

“…By contrast, collective farming was introduced in rural China in 1956 with the aim to stimulate agricultural production through collective work, which would not compete for resources and investment with industries. This, however, placed rural China in a position of disadvantage, situating it as the base from which materials and capital were supplied to cities and industries [21].…”

The China Population and Labor Yearbook, Volume 3

“…217 a price scissors model, Knight and Song (1999) depicted the distorted rural-urban relationship, which is characterized by a large income gap and conditioned by an unlimited supply of labor. Yang and Cai (2003) examined the changes in institutions influencing labor mobility and their impacts on the rural-urban income gap. From an economic standpoint, labor migration means that people move from a lowproductivity agricultural sector to higher-productivity non-agricultural sectors, and through the convergence of the marginal productivity of labor between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors, rural and urban income gaps should narrow.…”