Which regional inequality? The evolution of rural-urban and inland-coastal inequality in China from 1983 to 1995

This paper develops a unified empirical framework for describing the relative contribution of rural-urban and inland-coastal inequality to overall regional inequality in China during the 1980's and 1990's. The framework assesses rural-urban and inland-coastal inequalities from the same data set, presents results for a sufficiently long time period to transcend short-term fluctuations, allows for differential price changes, and applies a consistent notion of the contribution to inequality using a decomposition analysis. While the contribution of rural-urban inequality is much higher than that of inland-coastal inequality in terms of levels, the trend is very different. The rural-urban contribution has not changed very much over time, but the inland-coastal contribution has increased by several fold. The paper ends by investigating the role of labor migration in this outcome. (C) 1999 Academic Press.