| This paper's goal is to increase the understanding of the income and fiscal inequality trends in rural China. Using a comprehensive county-level panel dataset between 1993 and 2002, we describe the dynamic changes in national, regional and provincial inequality measures for income, fiscal spending and local revenues respectively. We examine how the coastal-inland gap, the inter-province gap, and the gap between poor and non-poor counties contribute to the growth of inequality, and devise a decomposition approach to investigate the order of inter-group inequality's contribution to the overall inequality in a multi-tier hierarchical economy. Our major finding reveals that after a turning point, 1998, most income and fiscal inequality trends started to grow... |
