Suchergebnisse

Entering the rank of middle-income countries, China will find it more difficult to move up further with the burdens of a rapidly ageing population, the fast deteriorating environment and rising social inequality

The Chinese Communist Party's has openly committed itself to fulfil the "Liang Ge Yibai Nian (Two Centenary) Goals" by years 2021 and 2049. To achieve these ambitious goals, China has to sustain sufficiently high annual growth rates of its economy in the coming years and decades. This endeavour faces serious challenges as China's economic growth is being pinned down by demographic and structural changes.

China's domestic migration in recent years has featured the migration of working-aged workers from the rural areas to cities and from the poor regions to the rich ones. As a result, the poor regions saw their elderly dependency ratios as well as median population age rise faster than that in the rich regions. This phenomenon of "youth drain" has profound impact on interregional disparity.

AbstractUsing data on China's provincial economies for the period 1978–2005, we decomposed the causes and factors that have contributed to inter‐regional per capita income disparity. Variance in capital per employee and variance in capital elasticity are found to be the two main sources of income disparity while the employment–labour force ratio is shown to be an important factor in containing the rise of income disparity. An analysis on inter‐regional factor reallocation effects reveals their relatively small and insignificant contributions to overall growth performance. It is also discovered that capital has in most years flowed in the right direction to pursue higher marginal productivity across provincial economies. Inter‐provincial labour movement, on the other hand, had not displayed significant equilibrating effects until institutional reforms started to allow freer inter‐regional labour mobility in later years. Generally, we conclude that market‐oriented factor mobility has played a crucial role in equalizing factor returns as well as enhancing growth efficiency across regions.