Is the Family Income Gap Between Big and Small Cities in China Narrowing
According to research data from the FTCR, a research service of the Financial Times in the United Kingdom, the income gap between households in rich cities and low-income cities in China has narrowed after the economic turmoil in 2015. According to the FTCR's household income statement, after the mid-2015 stock exchange crash, small cities' income has grown faster than first-tier cities. All along,China has been focusing its reform efforts on the east coast of China, resulting in unbalanced regional growth.It has also seen China's wealthiest cities struggling to cope with the influx of blue-collar and white-collar workers as they seek economic opportunities.The soaring asset prices in 2015 made China's regional economic development trend off track.FTCR believes that the narrowing of wealth income may come from other factors. Because housing prices are the source of China's family wealth growth, they speculate that the income gap has narrowed since 2015, reflecting the rise of housing prices.At this stage, in response to the turmoil in the housing market, the Chinese government has relatively quickly introduced a restriction policy in big cities to curb speculative activities and turned home purchase activities into other provinces. In fact, as the development of China’s largest and most saturated urban areas has become saturated, the driving force for development has expanded. It is worth noting that the data in the FTCR may not refer to household disposable income that we generally understand. According to what they call the factors of the rise of house prices that have been taken into account, the data is more likely to reflect changes in household assets, indicatingthat the income of household net assets in large and small cities of China is showing a shrinking trend.