The Gap between the Rich and the Poor in China Continues to Widen
The income distribution gap in China has remained big for a long time. The Gini coefficient approached 0.5 in the first decade of this century and hovered around 0.46 after 2010. Some scholars were optimistic that the inflection point of China's Kuznetz income curve had arrived with the growth of per capita GDP. However, since 2015, China’s Gini coefficient has increased slightly every year. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, it was 0.462 in 2015 and increased to 0.468 in 2018. The data from some research institutions is even more discouraging. The household survey data of the Income Distribution Research Institute of Beijing Normal University showed the proportion and scale of people with monthly income of 500 yuan, 1000 yuan, 2000 yuan. The corresponding income group accounted for 7.5%, 23.5% and 50.7% of the total population respectively, the implied overall population is 110 million, 310 million and 710 million, respectively, which means that more than 700 million people have monthly income below 2000 yuan. In addition, according to the Annual Report on China Household Income Distribution (2019), if urban residents are divided in to five groups, the top income group grew by 10.1% in 2018, the bottom income group by 1.2%, and the bottom income group by 4.8%. The income gap between the high and low income groups has expanded from 5.62 times in 2017 to 5.90 times, indicating that the income distribution gap tends to deteriorate further recently. It is worth noting that the relative growth rate of wage income of migrant workers began to decline after 2015. In 2017, the average annual income of migrant workers was 56% of the average income of urban workers in non-private sectors. In 2019, it fell to 52.5%. Analysis of the above phenomenon indicates that the factors leading to the widening of the income gap are still strong, the accelerated accumulation of property and the sharp expansion of the property gap become the driving factors for the widening of the income gap, and the income mobility and intergenerational mobility are decreasing, and the income class tends to solidification. Li Shi, a professor at the School of Public Administration at Zhejiang University and a member of the Expert Advisory Committee of the Leading Group for Poverty Alleviation and Development under the State Council, said recently that China's personal income gap is unlikely to shrink significantly in the short term.