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Why Is Income Inequality an Important Issue for the Chinese Society and Its Future Economic Growth?

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Why Is Income Inequality an Important Issue for the Chinese Society and Its Future Economic Growth?
Why is income inequality an important issue for the Chinese society and its future economic growth?

Introduction
Nowadays, China has become the second largest economy in the world. The GDP (gross domestic product) of china was growing at 9.7% per year in average since 1978, which the year of Chinese “open door” politic founded. China also has become the biggest producer and consumer in many key agricultural and industrial markets and the largest FDI recipient among the developing countries. The performance of china in developing of economy is called “china’s economic miracle”, which be studied by many economists. However, there are also bad results with the development of economy in china such as environment disruption, corruption and income inequality, which have been seen as important issues to Chinese society and its future economic growth.

The income inequality in china
The rising income inequality in china is seen as the most important issue to Chinese society and its future economic growth by many economists recently. The income inequality in china is complex and multi-dimensional, which is divided to four aspects that rural-urban income inequality, regional inequality, marginalisation and class formation.

The rural-urban income inequality actually has been existed in china since 1949. However, with the economic focus from agriculture shift to industry, the rural-urban income inequality gets large increased from 1984. These data which followed significantly showed the huge increasing of urban-rural income inequality in china

Figure 1 Urban and rural incomes per capita (1978-2006) Figure 2 Ratio of urban/rural incomes per capita (1978-2006)

As shown in figure 1, the urban-rural income inequality per capita increased from 200 Yuan at 1978 to about 8,000 Yuan at 2006. The figure 2 also showed about the increasing urban-rural income inequality that the ratio of urban to rural income per capita increased from 2.5 at 1978 to 3.3 by 2007 though it lower to

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