China’s Income Distribution and Inequality

ublicly available e examine rural, timating the entire ine trends in ased substantially gregate inequality, the growing gap all inequality increasingly important role in recent years. In contrast, only the growth of inequality within rural and urban areas is responsible for the increase in inequality in the United States, where the overall inequality is close to that of China. As a robustness check, we show that consumption inequality (which may be a proxy for permanent income inequality) in urban areas also rose considerably. We use a new method to estimate China’s income distributions using